in reply to POD translation to HTML bug?

Is my =item usage forbidden by POD rules?

Doesn't really matter :) but it isn't , see in perlpodspec, perlpod

Naturally this assumes the invalid-pod you posted is really valid pod in your real file

Can this be corrected in pod2html?

Sure, but why bother? Don't hold your breath :) What are you talking about? Maybe you want to upgrade Pod::Html, I have an old 1.1502, I don't get what you get

There are many alternatives to Pod::Html like Pod::Simple::... Pod::Simple::HTML, Pod::Simple::HTMLBatch, Pod::POM::View::HTML/Pod::POM::Web, Perl::Tidy 

    use Perl::Tidy();
    my $html = "";
    Perl::Tidy::perltidy(
        source => $modfile,
        destination => \$html,
        argv => " -html ",
        stderr => File::Spec->devnull,
    );
    return $html;

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In the meantime, how can I workaround this shortcoming?

Well, I would stop using XML::Parser as its very low level. I would use XML::Twig or XML::LibXML

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Re^2: POD translation to HTML bug? (pod2html)
by ajl52 (Novice) on Dec 06, 2013 at 11:24 UTC

    What am I talking about?

    I tried to use existing command tools to add POD info to a technical web-site. As a consequence, pod2html, a a command line tool, seemed to be the right choice. No programming, no trouble.

    That worked fine until I wanted to integrate these pages into the look-and-feel of the rest of the site. This is when I discovered 1) output of pod2html is XHTML, not HTML, 2) some elements, aka <dt>, are not properly closed in exceptional circumstances.

    What do I want to do?

    Certainly not a full file processing.

    Basically, remove the xml declaration <?xml ... ?>, replace the XHTML DOCTYPE by the HTML DOCTYPE, retrieve important information from <head> block to adapt it to the site rules, add my standard header at the beginning of the <body> block and my standard footer before the </body> tag.

    As can be seen, this does not require a full XML parser.

    Workaround as of today

    I have written a very small Perl script reading a faulty XHTML file and looking for <dt> tags. If a <dd> tag is seen without a previous </dt> tag, the missing tag is inserted right before <dd> tag.

    Just needs a simple state automaton.

    Now, my transformation becomes:

    pod2html perl-file-with-pod.pm | checkdt | adapt-to-site-look -o outpu
+tfile.html

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    Suggestions

    I'll have a look at XML::Twig and XML::LibXML if basic features XML::Parser give too complex a code.

    Bug fix

    Fixing a bug is always a good thing. Since this one has been exposed to the light, it should be fixed, all the most if it is easy.

    Thanks to all for the information;

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      What am I talking about? I tried to ... repeat word description

      Prove it, with example pod, example html output, and versioninformation

      I couldn't reproduce your claims with my pod2html (the version I mentioned), the dt was properly closed, it worked contrary to what you reported ... pretend as if you're making a real bug report :)

      What do I want to do? ....

      I don't remember asking those :D

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        No offence was intended. It was kind of conclusion/closing of the thread.

        However, you puzzled me with the non-reproduced behaviour. Consequently, I wrote a small sample case:

        =pod
=over
=item
Sample paragraph
=item Non-empty
Second sample
=back
=cut
1;

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        Empty lines suppressed to make it smaller.

        I then run pod2html --infile=podbug.pm --outfile=podbug.html and the result is:

        <?xml version="1.0" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w
+3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>podbug.pm</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<link rev="made" href="mailto:root@localhost" />
</head>

<body style="background-color: white">


<!-- INDEX BEGIN -->
<div name="index">
<p><a name="__index__"></a></p>


</div>
<!-- INDEX END -->

<dl>
<dt>
<dd>
<p>Sample paragraph</p>
</dd>
<dt><strong><a name="non_empty" class="item">Non-empty</a></strong></d
+t>

<dd>
<p>Second sample</p>
</dd>
</dl>

</body>

</html>

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        From this output:

        1. It is clearly XHTML, not HTML, from the declaration in line 1 and DOCTYPE in line 2
        2. Empty =item is translated by a single <dt> without closing </dt>, which is legal in HTML but not in XHTML
        3. Non-empty =item is correctly translated

        Version information

        I don't know into which package pod2html is stored. My present Perl installation is v5.14.4 (should be upgraded within a month). I found Pod::Simple::HTML in the library and it claims version 3.16.

        I'm no Perl guru, but from a quick look to this package, I doubt it is used by pod2html because the DOCTYPE in it is for HTML 4.01 Transitional

        Regards

        PS: If you need more version information, tell me how to find it.

        PPS: It would be nicer to attach the test files but I don't know how to do it.

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