In Perl >= 5.8.0 it is not a problem:

# opens filehandle to "in memory" files held in Perl scalars
open($fh,'>', \$variable);
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In Perl < 5.8.0 you can use IO::Scalar to do the same thing.

Another comment: why not patch existing module to do what you want instead of creating yet another CPAN module?

--
Ilya Martynov, ilya@iponweb.net
CTO IPonWEB (UK) Ltd
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Personal website - http://martynov.org

Firstly, thanks for the feedback.

Secondly: I'm (still) using 5.6.1 and did't know of the feature you mentioned. Using IO::Scalar might also be feasable.

Another comment: why not patch existing module to do what you want instead of creating yet another CPAN module?

Pod::Parser seems rather complex, so I thought patching it to return a scalar instead of writing to a FILEHANDLE would be hard. Passing an IO::Scalar-FH (or adding some methods to Pod::Parser that implement this) might be a good idea.

On the other hand, Pod::Parser seems like a little bit of overkill, if all I want to do is remove POD.

I'll give it a thought, and talk to Marek Rouchal about patching Pod::Parser.

UPDATE

Marek suggested using Pod::Simple, as "therein lies the future" (his words). So I'll take a look there...

--
#!/usr/bin/perl
for(ref bless{},just'another'perl'hacker){s-:+-$"-g&&print$_.$/}
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Furthermore, there's no POD in the following code:

    print "Hello,
    =pod
    world
    =cut
    ";
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Although your stripper would remove three lines from the code.

Abigail

I've at least two modules on CPAN that will break if you remove everything after __DATA__. Note also that all modules that use AutoLoader or SelfLoader will have the bulk of their code after a __DATA__ or __END__ token.

Good point. So I'll leave __DATA__ and __END__ as is.

Furthermore, there's no POD in the following code:

print "Hello, 
=pod 
world 
=cut ";
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Although your stripper would remove three lines from the code.

Another good point. I'm currently trying to get on the pod-people mailing list, but the subscriber adress seems to be broken..

Anyway, thanks for the feedback, I'll try to get Pod::Simple to DWIM.

--
#!/usr/bin/perl
for(ref bless{},just'another'perl'hacker){s-:+-$"-g&&print$_.$/}
[download]

I can understand the feeling that Pod::Parser is overkill, but:

• Why strings?
• What about DATA filehandles?

-- 
        dakkar - Mobilis in mobile

* Why strings?

Because for some reasons having to do with cpanstats I want to analyse the code of some CPAN modules. I'm not interested in the POD, so I want to remove it. And I do not want to mess around with files (especially when running some analysis on all of CPAN) just to remove POD.

What I want is something like

my $podless=remove_pod($code)
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so I can mung $podless.

* What about DATA filehandles?

I'm not sure what you mean by this..

--
#!/usr/bin/perl
for(ref bless{},just'another'perl'hacker){s-:+-$"-g&&print$_.$/}
[download]

What I meant is: since you are removing everything after __DATA__, if the program had something besides POD in there, and accessed it via the DATA filehandle, it would no longer work.

Reading your reply, anyway, I'm starting to believe you are not going to run those script.

-- 
        dakkar - Mobilis in mobile

...patching it to return a scalar instead of writing to a FILEHANDLE would be hard...

I had a look at Pod::Parser and found how to do it easily.

You just pass two filehandles instead of one, like this:

my $stripper = new Pod::Stripper();
my $stripped;

open my $fh, '<', 'pod.pl';
open my $stripped_fh, '>', \$stripped;

$stripper->parse_from_filehandle( $fh, $stripped_fh );

close $stripped_fh;
close $fh;

print $stripped;
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