...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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