Pod::Markdown - Convert POD to Markdown

version 3.400

# Pod::Simple API is supported.

# Command line usage: Parse a pod file and print to STDOUT:
# $ perl -MPod::Markdown -e 'Pod::Markdown->new->filter(@ARGV)' path/to/POD/file > README.md

# Work with strings:
my $markdown;
my $parser = Pod::Markdown->new;
$parser->output_string(\$markdown);
$parser->parse_string_document($pod_string);

# See Pod::Simple docs for more.

This module uses Pod::Simple to convert POD to Markdown.

Literal characters in Pod that are special in Markdown (like *asterisks*) are backslash-escaped when appropriate.

By default markdown and html formatted regions are accepted. Regions of markdown will be passed through unchanged. Regions of html will be placed inside a <div> tag so that markdown characters won't be processed. Regions of :markdown or :html will be processed as POD and included. To change which regions are accepted use the Pod::Simple API:

my $parser = Pod::Markdown->new;
$parser->unaccept_targets(qw( markdown html ));

The common Pod::Simple API returns a character string. If you want Pod::Markdown to return encoded octets, there are two attributes to assist: "match_encoding" and "output_encoding".

When an output encoding is requested any characters that are not valid for that encoding will be escaped as HTML entities.

This is not 100% safe, however.

Markdown escapes all ampersands inside of code spans, so escaping a character as an HTML entity inside of a code span will not be correct. However, with pod's S and E sequences it is possible to end up with high-bit characters inside of code spans.

So, while output_encoding => 'ascii' can work, it is not recommended. For these reasons (and more), UTF-8 is the default, fallback encoding (when one is required).

If you prefer HTML entities over literal characters you can use "html_encode_chars" which will only operate outside of code spans (where it is safe).

Pod::Markdown->new(%options);

The constructor accepts the following named arguments:

• local_module_url_prefix

  Alters the perldoc urls that are created from L<> codes when the module is a "local" module ("Local::*" or "Foo_Corp::*" (see perlmodlib)).

  The default is to use perldoc_url_prefix.

• local_module_re

  Alternate regular expression for determining "local" modules. Default is our $LOCAL_MODULE_RE = qr/^(Local::|\w*?_\w*)/.

• man_url_prefix

  Alters the man page urls that are created from L<> codes.

  The default is http://man.he.net/man.

• perldoc_url_prefix

  Alters the perldoc urls that are created from L<> codes. Can be:

  • metacpan (shortcut for https://metacpan.org/pod/)
  • sco (shortcut for http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?)
  • any url

  The default is metacpan.

    Pod::Markdown->new(perldoc_url_prefix => 'http://localhost/perl/pod');
  

• perldoc_fragment_format

  Alters the format of the url fragment for any L<> links that point to a section of an external document (["section" in name](https://metacpan.org/pod/name#section)). The default will be chosen according to the destination "perldoc_url_prefix". Alternatively you can specify one of the following:

  • metacpan
  • sco
  • pod_simple_xhtml
  • pod_simple_html
  • A code ref

  The code ref can expect to receive two arguments: the parser object ($self) and the section text. For convenience the topic variable ($_) is also set to the section text:

    perldoc_fragment_format => sub { s/\W+/-/g; }
  

• markdown_fragment_format

  Alters the format of the url fragment for any L<> links that point to an internal section of this document (["section"](#section)).

  Unfortunately the format of the id attributes produced by whatever system translates the markdown into html is unknown at the time the markdown is generated so we do some simple clean up.

  Note: markdown_fragment_format and perldoc_fragment_format accept the same values: a (shortcut to a) method name or a code ref.

• include_meta_tags

  Specifies whether or not to print author/title meta tags at the top of the document. Default is false.

• escape_url

  Specifies whether or not to escape URLs. Default is true. It is not recommended to turn this off with an empty local_module_url_prefix, as the resulting local module URLs can be confused with IPv6 addresses by web browsers.

A string of characters to encode as html entities (using "encode_entities" in HTML::Entities if available, falling back to numeric entities if not).

Possible values:

• A value of 1 will use the default set of characters from HTML::Entities (control chars, high-bit chars, and <&>"').
• A false value will disable.
• Any other value is used as a string of characters (like a regular expression character class).

By default this is disabled and literal characters will be in the output stream. If you specify a desired "output_encoding" any characters not valid for that encoding will be HTML entity encoded.

Note that Markdown requires ampersands (&) and left angle brackets (<) to be entity-encoded if they could otherwise be interpreted as html entities. If this attribute is configured to encode those characters, they will always be encoded. If not, the module will make an effort to only encode the ones required, so there will be less html noise in the output.

Boolean: If true, use the =encoding of the input pod as the encoding for the output.

If no encoding is specified, Pod::Simple will guess the encoding if it sees a high-bit character.

If no encoding is guessed (or the specified encoding is unusable), "output_encoding" will be used if it was specified. Otherwise UTF-8 will be used.

This attribute is not recommended but is provided for consistency with other pod converters.

Defaults to false.

The encoding to use when writing to the output file handle.

If neither this nor "match_encoding" are specified, a character string will be returned in whatever Pod::Simple output method you specified.

Returns the regular expression used to determine local modules.

Returns the url prefix in use for local modules.

Returns the url prefix in use for man pages.

Returns the url prefix in use (after resolving shortcuts to urls).

Returns the coderef or format name used to format a url fragment to a section in an external document.

Returns the coderef or format name used to format a url fragment to an internal section in this document.

Returns the boolean value indicating whether or not meta tags will be printed.

Returns the boolean value indicating whether or not URLs should be escaped.

Used internally to create a url (using "man_url_prefix") from a string like man(1).

# With $name and section being the two parts of L<name/section>.
my $url = $parser->format_perldoc_url($name, $section);

Used internally to create a url from the name (of a module or script) and a possible section (heading).

The format of the url fragment (when pointing to a section in a document) varies depending on the destination url so "perldoc_fragment_format" is used (which can be customized).

If the module name portion of the link is blank then the section is treated as an internal fragment link (to a section of the generated markdown document) and "markdown_fragment_format" is used (which can be customized).

Format url fragment for an internal link by replacing non-word characters with dashes.

Format url fragment like "idify" in Pod::Simple::XHTML.

Format url fragment like "section_name_tidy" in Pod::Simple::HTML.

Format fragment for metacpan.org (uses "format_fragment_pod_simple_xhtml").

Format fragment for search.cpan.org (uses "format_fragment_pod_simple_html").

Uses local_module_re to determine if passed module is a "local" module.

• pod2markdown - script included for command line usage
• Pod::Simple - Super class that handles Pod parsing
• perlpod - For writing POD
• perlpodspec - For parsing POD
• http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax - Markdown spec

You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.

perldoc Pod::Markdown

The following websites have more information about this module, and may be of help to you. As always, in addition to those websites please use your favorite search engine to discover more resources.

• MetaCPAN

  A modern, open-source CPAN search engine, useful to view POD in HTML format.

  https://metacpan.org/release/Pod-Markdown

Please report any bugs or feature requests by email to bug-pod-markdown at rt.cpan.org, or through the web interface at https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Report.html?Queue=Pod-Markdown. You will be automatically notified of any progress on the request by the system.

https://github.com/rwstauner/Pod-Markdown

git clone https://github.com/rwstauner/Pod-Markdown.git

• Marcel Gruenauer marcel@cpan.org
• Victor Moral victor@taquiones.net
• Ryan C. Thompson <rct at thompsonclan d0t org>
• Aristotle Pagaltzis pagaltzis@gmx.de
• Randy Stauner rwstauner@cpan.org

• Aristotle Pagaltzis aristotle@cpan.org
• Cindy Wang (CindyLinz) cindylinz@gmail.com
• Graham Ollis plicease@cpan.org
• Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues josch@mister-muffin.de
• Mike Covington mfcovington@gmail.com
• motemen motemen@cpan.org
• moznion moznion@cpan.org
• Peter Vereshagin veresc@cpan.org
• Ryan C. Thompson rthompson@cpan.org
• Yasutaka ATARASHI yakex@cpan.org

This software is copyright (c) 2009-2011 by Marcel Gruenauer.

This software is copyright (c) 2011 by Randy Stauner.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.