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hello all,

a few days ago I was doing some data munging on the perlfaq manpages (basically, splitting each page in single faqs and put them in a DB table) and after a while I realized I had the need to convert a snippet of POD (a single faq) to HTML.

I promptly typed use Pod::Html; but suddenly I felt something was wrong. what I wanted was something like:

my $html_snippet = pod2html($pod_snippet);
[download]

but Pod::Html seems to be nothing more than a backend for the (totally fine) pod2html script. Thus, it only accepts input from a file (or STDIN) and writes to a file (or STDOUT). gack.

for my application, which is a CGI script, I was absolutely reluctant to spool on the filesystem, and while I can think about redirecting STDOUT to a variable, setting up a fake STDIN for pod2html to read from a variable looks, at the very least, unnecessarily complicated.

after a bit of homework, I found a solution (workaround?) to my problem:

use IO::Scalar;
use Pod::Tree::HTML;
$html_snippet = "";
$html_snippet_handle = IO::Scalar->new(\$html_snippet);
$pod2html = Pod::Tree::HTML->new(\$pod_snippet, $html_snippet_handle);
$pod2html->translate;
[download]

it works ($html_snippet will contain the pod2htmlized $pod_snippet), but it required the installation of 4 additional modules (let alone syntactic cruft and efficiency concerns), just to make something that Pod::Html could, and should, very easily handle.

so the question is: am I the only one to think that Pod::Html should do far, far much more than it does now? and if it doesn't want to do it, let's kick it out from CPAN! ;-)

cheers,
Aldo

King of Laziness, Wizard of Impatience, Lord of Hubris

In reply to unhappy with Pod::Html by dada

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