| PERLPOD(1) | Perl Programmers Reference Guide | PERLPOD(1) |
perlpod - the Plain Old Documentation format
Pod is a simple-to-use markup language used for writing documentation for Perl, Perl programs, and Perl modules.
Translators are available for converting Pod to various formats like plain text, HTML, man pages, and more.
Pod markup consists of three basic kinds of paragraphs: ordinary, verbatim, and command.
Most paragraphs in your documentation will be ordinary blocks of text, like this one. You can simply type in your text without any markup whatsoever, and with just a blank line before and after. When it gets formatted, it will undergo minimal formatting, like being rewrapped, probably put into a proportionally spaced font, and maybe even justified.
You can use formatting codes in ordinary paragraphs, for bold, italic, "code-style", hyperlinks, and more. Such codes are explained in the "Formatting Codes" section, below.
Verbatim paragraphs are usually used for presenting a codeblock or other text which does not require any special parsing or formatting, and which shouldn't be wrapped.
A verbatim paragraph is distinguished by having its first character be a space or a tab. (And commonly, all its lines begin with spaces and/or tabs.) It should be reproduced exactly, with tabs assumed to be on 8-column boundaries. There are no special formatting codes, so you can't italicize or anything like that. A \ means \, and nothing else.
A command paragraph is used for special treatment of whole chunks of text, usually as headings or parts of lists.
All command paragraphs (which are typically only one line long) start with "=", followed by an identifier, followed by arbitrary text that the command can use however it pleases. Currently recognized commands are
=pod
=head1 Heading Text
=head2 Heading Text
=head3 Heading Text
=head4 Heading Text
=head5 Heading Text
=head6 Heading Text
=over indentlevel
=item stuff
=back
=begin format
=end format
=for format text...
=encoding type
=cut
To explain them each in detail:
=head2 Object Attributes
The text "Object Attributes" comprises the heading there. The text in these heading commands can use formatting codes, as seen here:
=head2 Possible Values for C<$/>
Such commands are explained in the "Formatting Codes" section, below.
Note that "head5" and "head6" were introduced in 2020 and in Pod::Simple 3.41, released in October 2020, so they might not be supported on the Pod parser you use.
=item Using C<$|> to Control Buffering
Such commands are explained in the "Formatting Codes" section, below.
Note also that there are some basic rules to using "=over" ... "=back" regions:
If you start with bullets or numbers, stick with them, as formatters use the first "=item" type to decide how to format the list.
=item stuff()
This function does stuff.
=cut
sub stuff {
...
}
=pod
Remember to check its return value, as in:
stuff() || die "Couldn't do stuff!";
=cut
A command "=begin formatname", some paragraphs, and a command "=end formatname", mean that the text/data in between is meant for formatters that understand the special format called formatname. For example,
=begin html
<hr> <img src="thang.png">
<p> This is a raw HTML paragraph </p>
=end html
The command "=for formatname text..." specifies that the remainder of just this paragraph (starting right after formatname) is in that special format.
=for html <hr> <img src="thang.png">
<p> This is a raw HTML paragraph </p>
This means the same thing as the above "=begin html" ... "=end html" region.
That is, with "=for", you can have only one paragraph's worth of text (i.e., the text in "=foo targetname text..."), but with "=begin targetname" ... "=end targetname", you can have any amount of stuff in between. (Note that there still must be a blank line after the "=begin" command and a blank line before the "=end" command.)
Here are some examples of how to use these:
=begin html
<br>Figure 1.<br><IMG SRC="figure1.png"><br>
=end html
=begin text
---------------
| foo |
| bar |
---------------
^^^^ Figure 1. ^^^^
=end text
Some format names that formatters currently are known to accept include "roff", "man", "latex", "tex", "text", and "html". (Some formatters will treat some of these as synonyms.)
A format name of "comment" is common for just making notes (presumably to yourself) that won't appear in any formatted version of the Pod document:
=for comment
Make sure that all the available options are documented!
Some formatnames will require a leading colon (as in "=for :formatname", or "=begin :formatname" ... "=end :formatname"), to signal that the text is not raw data, but instead is Pod text (i.e., possibly containing formatting codes) that's just not for normal formatting (e.g., may not be a normal-use paragraph, but might be for formatting as a footnote).
=encoding latin1
=encoding utf8
=encoding koi8-r
=encoding ShiftJIS
=encoding big5
"=encoding" affects the whole document, and must occur only once.
And don't forget, all commands but "=encoding" last up until the end of its paragraph, not its line. So in the examples below, you can see that every command needs the blank line after it, to end its paragraph. (And some older Pod translators may require the "=encoding" line to have a following blank line as well, even though it should be legal to omit.)
Some examples of lists include:
=over =item * First item =item * Second item =back =over =item Foo() Description of Foo function =item Bar() Description of Bar function =back
In ordinary paragraphs and in some command paragraphs, various formatting codes (a.k.a. "interior sequences") can be used:
Link to a Perl manual page (e.g., "L<Net::Ping>"). Note that "name" should not contain spaces. This syntax is also occasionally used for references to Unix man pages, as in "L<crontab(5)>".
Link to a section in other manual page. E.g., "L<perlsyn/"For Loops">"
Link to a section in this manual page. E.g., "L</"Object Methods">"
A section is started by the named heading or item. For example, "L<perlvar/$.>" or "L<perlvar/"$.">" both link to the section started by ""=item $."" in perlvar. And "L<perlsyn/For Loops>" or "L<perlsyn/"For Loops">" both link to the section started by ""=head2 For Loops"" in perlsyn.
To control what text is used for display, you use ""L<text|...>"", as in:
Link this text to that manual page. E.g., "L<Perl Error Messages|perldiag>"
Link this text to that section in that manual page. E.g., "L<postfix "if"|perlsyn/"Statement Modifiers">"
Link this text to that section in this manual page. E.g., "L<the various attributes|/"Member Data">"
Or you can link to a web page:
"L<text|scheme:...>"
Links to an absolute URL. For example, "L<http://www.perl.org/>" or "L<The Perl Home Page|http://www.perl.org/>".
The above four are optional except in other formatting codes, notably "L<...>", and when preceded by a capital letter.
Some non-numeric HTML entity name, such as "E<eacute>", meaning the same thing as "é" in HTML -- i.e., a lowercase e with an acute (/-shaped) accent.
The ASCII/Latin-1/Unicode character with that number. A leading "0x" means that number is hex, as in "E<0x201E>". A leading "0" means that number is octal, as in "E<075>". Otherwise number is interpreted as being in decimal, as in "E<181>".
Note that older Pod formatters might not recognize octal or hex numeric escapes, and that many formatters cannot reliably render characters above 255. (Some formatters may even have to use compromised renderings of Latin-1/CP-1252 characters, like rendering "E<eacute>" as just a plain "e".)
Another use is to indicate that stuff in "=item Z<>stuff..." is not to be considered to be a bullet or number. For example, without the "Z<>", the line
=item Z<>500 Server error
could possibly be parsed as an item in a numbered list when it isn't meant to be.
Still another use is to maintain visual space between "=item" lines. If you specify
=item foo
=item bar
it will typically get rendered as
foo
bar
That may be what you want, but if what you really want is
foo
bar
you can use "Z<>" to accomplish that
=item foo
Z<>
=item bar
Most of the time, you will need only a single set of angle brackets to delimit the beginning and end of formatting codes. However, sometimes you will want to put a real right angle bracket (a greater-than sign, '>') inside of a formatting code. This is particularly common when using a formatting code to provide a different font-type for a snippet of code. As with all things in Perl, there is more than one way to do it. One way is to simply escape the closing bracket using an "E" code:
C<$a E<lt>=E<gt> $b>
This will produce: ""$a <=> $b""
A more readable, and perhaps more "plain" way is to use an alternate set of delimiters that doesn't require a single ">" to be escaped. Doubled angle brackets ("<<" and ">>") may be used if and only if there is whitespace right after the opening delimiter and whitespace right before the closing delimiter! For example, the following will do the trick:
C<< $a <=> $b >>
In fact, you can use as many repeated angle-brackets as you like so long as you have the same number of them in the opening and closing delimiters, and make sure that whitespace immediately follows the last '<' of the opening delimiter, and immediately precedes the first '>' of the closing delimiter. (The whitespace is ignored.) So the following will also work:
C<<< $a <=> $b >>>
C<<<< $a <=> $b >>>>
And they all mean exactly the same as this:
C<$a E<lt>=E<gt> $b>
The multiple-bracket form does not affect the interpretation of the contents of the formatting code, only how it must end. That means that the examples above are also exactly the same as this:
C<< $a E<lt>=E<gt> $b >>
As a further example, this means that if you wanted to put these bits of code in "C" (code) style:
open(X, ">>thing.dat") || die $!
$foo->bar();
you could do it like so:
C<<< open(X, ">>thing.dat") || die $! >>>
C<< $foo->bar(); >>
which is presumably easier to read than the old way:
C<open(X, "E<gt>E<gt>thing.dat") || die $!>
C<$foo-E<gt>bar();>
This is currently supported by pod2text (Pod::Text), pod2man (Pod::Man), and any other pod2xxx or Pod::Xxxx translators that use Pod::Parser 1.093 or later, or Pod::Tree 1.02 or later.
The intent is simplicity of use, not power of expression. Paragraphs look like paragraphs (block format), so that they stand out visually, and so that I could run them through "fmt" easily to reformat them (that's F7 in my version of vi, or Esc Q in my version of emacs). I wanted the translator to always leave the "'" and "`" and """ quotes alone, in verbatim mode, so I could slurp in a working program, shift it over four spaces, and have it print out, er, verbatim. And presumably in a monospace font.
The Pod format is not necessarily sufficient for writing a book. Pod is just meant to be an idiot-proof common source for nroff, HTML, TeX, and other markup languages, as used for online documentation. Translators exist for pod2text, pod2html, pod2man (that's for nroff(1) and troff(1)), pod2latex, and pod2fm. Various others are available in CPAN.
You can embed Pod documentation in your Perl modules and scripts. Start your documentation with an empty line, a "=head1" command at the beginning, and end it with a "=cut" command and an empty line. The perl executable will ignore the Pod text. You can place a Pod statement where perl expects the beginning of a new statement, but not within a statement, as that would result in an error. See any of the supplied library modules for examples.
If you're going to put your Pod at the end of the file, and you're using an "__END__" or "__DATA__" cut mark, make sure to put an empty line there before the first Pod command.
__END__ =head1 NAME Time::Local - efficiently compute time from local and GMT time
Without that empty line before the "=head1", many translators wouldn't have recognized the "=head1" as starting a Pod block.
The podchecker command is provided for checking Pod syntax for errors and warnings. For example, it checks for completely blank lines in Pod blocks and for unknown commands and formatting codes. You should still also pass your document through one or more translators and proofread the result, or print out the result and proofread that. Some of the problems found may be bugs in the translators, which you may or may not wish to work around.
# - - - - - - - - - - - -
=item $firecracker->boom()
This noisily detonates the firecracker object.
=cut
sub boom {
...
...will make such Pod translators completely fail to see the Pod block at all.
Instead, have it like this:
# - - - - - - - - - - - -
=item $firecracker->boom()
This noisily detonates the firecracker object.
=cut
sub boom {
...
perlpodspec, "PODs: Embedded Documentation" in perlsyn, perlnewmod, perldoc, pod2html, pod2man, podchecker.
Larry Wall, Sean M. Burke
| 2024-02-27 | perl v5.40.0 |