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

[download]

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;

In reply to Re^2: POD translation to HTML bug? (pod2html) by ajl52
in thread POD translation to HTML bug? by ajl52

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