Pod::Spell(3)

NAME
Pod::Spell - a formatter for spellchecking Pod

VERSION
version 1.13

SYNOPSIS
        use Pod::Spell;
        Pod::Spell->new->parse_from_file( 'File.pm' );

        Pod::Spell->new->parse_from_filehandle( $infile, $outfile );

Also look at podspell

        % perl -MPod::Spell -e "Pod::Spell->new->parse_from_file(shift)" Thing.pm |spell |fmt

...or instead of piping to spell or "ispell", use ">temp.txt", and open temp.txt in your word processor for spell-checking.

DESCRIPTION
Pod::Spell is a Pod formatter whose output is good for spellchecking. Pod::Spell rather like Pod::Text, except that it doesn't put much effort into actual formatting, and it suppresses things that look like Perl symbols or Perl jargon (so that your spellchecking program won't complain about mystery words like "$thing" or ""Foo::Bar"" or "hashref").

This class provides no new public methods. All methods of interest are inherited from Pod::Parser (which see). The especially interesting ones are "parse_from_filehandle" (which without arguments takes from STDIN and sends to STDOUT) and "parse_from_file". But you can probably just make do with the examples in the synopsis though.

This class works by filtering out words that look like Perl or any form of computerese (like "$thing" or ""N>7"" or ""@{$foo}{'bar','baz'}"", anything in C<...> or F<...> codes, anything in verbatim paragraphs (code blocks), and anything in the stopword list. The default stopword list for a document starts out from the stopword list defined by Pod::Wordlist, and can be supplemented (on a per-document basis) by having "=for stopwords" / "=for :stopwords" region(s) in a document.

METHODS

  new

  command

  interior_sequence

  textblock

  verbatim

  stopwords
        $self->stopwords->isa('Pod::WordList'); # true

ENCODINGS
Pod::Parser, which Pod::Spell extends, is extremely naive about character encodings. The "parse_from_file" method does not apply any PerlIO encoding layer. If your Pod file is encoded in UTF-8, your data will be read incorrectly.

You should instead use "parse_from_filehandle" and manage the input and output layers yourself.

        binmode($_, ":utf8") for ($infile, $outfile);
        $my ps = Pod::Spell->new;
        $ps->parse_from_filehandle( $infile, $outfile );

If your output destination cannot handle UTF-8, you should set your output handle to Latin-1 and tell Pod::Spell to strip out words with wide characters.

        binmode($infile, ":utf8");
        binmode($outfile, ":encoding(latin1)");
        $my ps = Pod::Spell->new( no_wide_chars => 1 );
        $ps->parse_from_filehandle( $infile, $outfile );

ADDING STOPWORDS
You can add stopwords on a per-document basis with "=for stopwords" / "=for :stopwords" regions, like so:

  =for stopwords  plok Pringe zorch   snik !qux
  foo bar baz quux quuux

This adds every word in that paragraph after "stopwords" to the stopword list, effective for the rest of the document. In such a list, words are whitespace-separated. (The amount of whitespace doesn't matter, as long as there's no blank lines in the middle of the paragraph.) Plural forms are added automatically using Lingua::EN::Inflect. Words beginning with "!" are deleted from the stopword list -- so "!qux" deletes "qux" from the stopword list, if it was in there in the first place. Note that if a stopword is all-lowercase, then it means that it's okay in any case; but if the word has any capital letters, then it means that it's okay only with that case. So a Wordlist entry of "perl" would permit "perl", "Perl", and (less interestingly) "PERL", "pERL", "PerL", et cetera. However, a Wordlist entry of "Perl" catches only "Perl", not "perl". So if you wanted to make sure you said only "Perl", never "perl", you could add this to the top of your document:

  =for stopwords !perl Perl

Then all instances of the word "Perl" would be weeded out of the Pod::Spell-formatted version of your document, but any instances of the word "perl" would be left in (unless they were in a C<...> or F<...> style).

You can have several "=for stopwords" regions in your document. You can even express them like so:

  =begin stopwords

  plok Pringe zorch

  snik !qux

  foo bar
  baz quux quuux

  =end stopwords

If you want to use E<...> sequences in a "stopwords" region, you have to use ":stopwords", as here:

  =for :stopwords
  virtE<ugrave>

...meaning that you're adding a stopword of "virtu". If you left the ":" out, that would mean you were adding a stopword of "virtE<ugrave>" (with a literal E, a literal <, etc), which will have no effect, since any occurrences of virtE<ugrave> don't look like a normal human-language word anyway, and so would be screened out before the stopword list is consulted anyway.

BUGS AND LIMITATIONS

  finding stopwords defined with "=for"
Pod::Spell makes a single pass over the POD. Stopwords must be added before they show up in the POD.

  finding the wordlist
Pod::Spell uses File::ShareDir::ProjectDistDir if you're getting errors about the wordlist being missing, chances are it's a problem with its heuristics. Set "PATH_ISDEV_DEBUG=1" or "PATH_FINDDEV_DEBUG=1", or both in your environment for debugging, and then file a bug with File::ShareDir::ProjectDistDir if necessary.

HINT
If you feed output of Pod::Spell into your word processor and run a spell-check, make sure you're not also running a grammar-check -- because Pod::Spell drops words that it thinks are Perl symbols, jargon, or stopwords, this means you'll have ungrammatical sentences, what with words being missing and all. And you don't need a grammar checker to tell you that.

SEE ALSO
Pod::Wordlist

Pod::Parser

podchecker also known as Pod::Checker

perlpod, perlpodspec

BUGS
Please report any bugs or feature requests on the bugtracker website https://github.com/xenoterracide/pod-spell/issues

When submitting a bug or request, please include a test-file or a patch to an existing test-file that illustrates the bug or desired feature.

CONTRIBUTORS

•   David Golden <dagolden@cpan.org>

•   Olivier Mengue <dolmen@cpan.org>

AUTHORS

•   Sean M. Burke <sburke@cpan.org>

•   Caleb Cushing <xenoterracide@gmail.com>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
This software is Copyright (c) 2013 by Caleb Cushing.

This is free software, licensed under:

  The Artistic License 2.0 (GPL Compatible)