They all appear, but because most of the authors haven't registered the namespace, the descriptions don't show

Ah. Light dawns. Apologies for being dense.

The description field is part of the metadata associated with registered modules - so it won't exist for non registered ones.

Can you give an example of the text that search.cpan is showing for non-registered modules that you thought was the module description?

My guess is that it's something that's been extracted from the SYNOPSIS or DESCRIPTION sections of the POD - in which case you're going to be screen scraping search.cpan, or downloading and extracting the POD from the distribution.


In reply to Re^5: Searching for Modules and Descriptions on CPAN Remotely by adrianh
in thread Searching for Modules and Descriptions on CPAN Remotely by ghenry

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