McA has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi all,

I just stumbled into a subtle problem with App::Cmd::Command:

The default behaviour of this module is to take an abstract from a #ABSTRACT comment in source code if it can't find something else. How can I tell it that my whole source file and therefore also the #ABSTRACT-line is UTF8-encoded?

I would like to avoid to write an extra abstract method to get around that problem.

Hints appreciated.

Best regards
McA

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: App::Cmd::Command and abstract encoding
by tobyink (Canon) on Feb 28, 2013 at 09:25 UTC

    One would hope that...

    use utf8;

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    ... would be sufficient, as that's how you tell Perl that some code is in UTF-8. It doesn't look like App::Cmd::Command pays heed to this though (see the abstract method defined therein).

    I'd argue that this is a bug.

    Personally I'd just do:

    use utf8;
use constant abstract => q(go to the café);

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    package Cow { use Moo; has name => (is => 'lazy', default => sub { 'Mooington' }) } say Cow->new->name
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      Hi tobyink,

      thank you for the fast answer. Before checking whether someone answered here I had a look at the source code, too. So I had to smile reading your comment.

      I'm pretty sure it should be easy to react on a pattern 

      /^=encoding\s+[uU][tT][fF]-?8/

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      while in status $inpod.

      It seems to be a little harder to parse for a use utf8;-like statement.

      What do you think about scanning for =encoding ?

      Best regards
      McA

      P.S.: I forgot something: I work with App::Cmd in combination with dzil and dzil generates the pod entries for me.

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Re: App::Cmd::Command and abstract encoding
by McA (Priest) on Feb 28, 2013 at 10:19 UTC

    Hi,

    based on what I found in the source code and that I use a base class derived from App::Cmd::Command for all my commands I decided (constrained by time at the moment) to use the following solution:

    I wrote the following method in my Commands base class:

    sub abstract {
    my $self = shift;

    return decode('UTF-8', $self->SUPER::abstract(@_));
}

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    Don't forget use Encode qw(decode);.

    Happy programming
    McA

    P.S.: Have I ever mentioned that I hate the whole encoding stuff... ;-)

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Re: App::Cmd::Command and abstract encoding (=encoding utf8)
by Anonymous Monk on Feb 28, 2013 at 15:55 UTC
    perlpod/perlpodspec says use pod  =encoding encodingname directive, and Pod::Weaver should respect that, even though =encoding doesn't appear in the test suite
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      Hi,

      you're completely right. I do use =encoding and I get the right output of perldoc MyPackage. But the method abstract of App::Cmd::Command doesn't respect it when scanning for an abstract message for showing as help text. That's why I wrote earlier that this method could scan for a pod line =encoding and try to respect the given encoding. Have a look at the source code.

      Best regards
      McA

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        I asked rjbs on IRC and he said his preferred route was to just interpret all abstracts extracted from the source as being UTF-8, and forget about scanning for the encoding.

        I've offered to provide him with a patch, but if anyone beats me to it, that's just fine by me.

        package Cow { use Moo; has name => (is => 'lazy', default => sub { 'Mooington' }) } say Cow->new->name
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