my $html = `echo $plaintext | txt2html --extract`;
# -- or --
my $html = qx(echo $plaintext | txt2html --extract);
# where the ()s can be any seperator you can use on qw(), etc.
[download]

use IPC::Open2;

my($read_fh,$write_fh);
my $pid = open2($read_fh,$write_fh,"txt2html","--extract");
print $write_fh $plaintext;
close $write_fh;
my $html = do { local $/; <$read_fh> };
# or you can use a while(<$read_fh>) { ... } loop.
waitpid $pid, 0; # don't leave "zombies"
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use HTML::FromText;
print text2html($text, urls => 1, paras => 1, headings => 1);
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gav^

Backticks or qx will do that:

my $html = qx(echo $plaintext | txt2html --extract);
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Update: (remove foot from mouth) ++japhy is correct. In detail: echo would be ok (it's a shell builtin), but $plaintext = quotemeta $plaintext; needs to be said first. The absolute path to txt2html should be used. If $plaintext comes from a file, input redirection to txt2html would be better than reading it first and echoing.

After Compline,
Zaxo

Super unsafe. Not to mention, I'd think it's hard to extract HTML from a single line of text -- meaning, $plaintext is probably several lines long. It would need to be escaped and whatnot.

_____________________________________________________
Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;

I'm silly. Disregard my code. wog showed me the error of my ways.

Use pipes instead:

# interact with txt2html
pipe(READ, WRITE);

open WRITE, "| txt2html --extract";
print WRITE $plaintext;
close WRITE;

{ local $/; $html = <READ>; }
close READ;
[download]

_____________________________________________________
Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;