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POD2TEXT

Section: Perl Programmers Reference Guide (1)
Updated: 2017-08-16
Index Return to Main Contents

NAME

pod2text - Convert POD data to formatted ASCII text

SYNOPSIS

pod2text [-aclostu] [--code] [--errors=style] [-i indent]
[-q quotes] [--nourls] [--stderr] [-w width]
[input [output ...]]

pod2text -h

DESCRIPTION

pod2text is a front-end for Pod::Text and its subclasses. It uses them to generate formatted ASCII text from POD source. It can optionally use either termcap sequences or ANSI color escape sequences to format the text.

input is the file to read for POD source (the POD can be embedded in code). If input isn't given, it defaults to "STDIN". output, if given, is the file to which to write the formatted output. If output isn't given, the formatted output is written to "STDOUT". Several POD files can be processed in the same pod2text invocation (saving module load and compile times) by providing multiple pairs of input and output files on the command line.

OPTIONS

-a, --alt

Use an alternate output format that, among other things, uses a different heading style and marks "=item" entries with a colon in the left margin.

--code

Include any non-POD text from the input file in the output as well. Useful for viewing code documented with POD blocks with the POD rendered and the code left intact.

-c, --color

Format the output with ANSI color escape sequences. Using this option requires that Term::ANSIColor be installed on your system.

--errors=style

Set the error handling style. "die" says to throw an exception on any POD formatting error. "stderr" says to report errors on standard error, but not to throw an exception. "pod" says to include a POD ERRORS section in the resulting documentation summarizing the errors. "none" ignores POD errors entirely, as much as possible.

The default is "die".

-i indent, --indent=indent

Set the number of spaces to indent regular text, and the default indentation for "=over" blocks. Defaults to 4 spaces if this option isn't given.

-h, --help

Print out usage information and exit.

-l, --loose

Print a blank line after a "=head1" heading. Normally, no blank line is printed after "=head1", although one is still printed after "=head2", because this is the expected formatting for manual pages; if you're formatting arbitrary text documents, using this option is recommended.

-m width, --left-margin=width, --margin=width

The width of the left margin in spaces. Defaults to 0. This is the margin for all text, including headings, not the amount by which regular text is indented; for the latter, see -i option.

--nourls

Normally, L<> formatting codes with a URL but anchor text are formatted to show both the anchor text and the URL. In other words:

    L<foo|http://example.com/>

is formatted as:

    foo <http://example.com/>

This flag, if given, suppresses the URL when anchor text is given, so this example would be formatted as just "foo". This can produce less cluttered output in cases where the URLs are not particularly important.

-o, --overstrike

Format the output with overstrike printing. Bold text is rendered as character, backspace, character. Italics and file names are rendered as underscore, backspace, character. Many pagers, such as less, know how to convert this to bold or underlined text.

-q quotes, --quotes=quotes

Sets the quote marks used to surround C<> text to quotes. If quotes is a single character, it is used as both the left and right quote. Otherwise, it is split in half, and the first half of the string is used as the left quote and the second is used as the right quote.

quotes may also be set to the special value "none", in which case no quote marks are added around C<> text.

-s, --sentence

Assume each sentence ends with two spaces and try to preserve that spacing. Without this option, all consecutive whitespace in non-verbatim paragraphs is compressed into a single space.

--stderr

By default, pod2text dies if any errors are detected in the POD input. If --stderr is given and no --errors flag is present, errors are sent to standard error, but pod2text does not abort. This is equivalent to "--errors=stderr" and is supported for backward compatibility.

-t, --termcap

Try to determine the width of the screen and the bold and underline sequences for the terminal from termcap, and use that information in formatting the output. Output will be wrapped at two columns less than the width of your terminal device. Using this option requires that your system have a termcap file somewhere where Term::Cap can find it and requires that your system support termios. With this option, the output of pod2text will contain terminal control sequences for your current terminal type.

-u, --utf8

By default, pod2text tries to use the same output encoding as its input encoding (to be backward-compatible with older versions). This option says to instead force the output encoding to UTF-8.

Be aware that, when using this option, the input encoding of your POD source should be properly declared unless it's US-ASCII. Pod::Simple will attempt to guess the encoding and may be successful if it's Latin-1 or UTF-8, but it will warn, which by default results in a pod2text failure. Use the "=encoding" command to declare the encoding. See perlpod(1) for more information.

-w, --width=width, -width

The column at which to wrap text on the right-hand side. Defaults to 76, unless -t is given, in which case it's two columns less than the width of your terminal device.

EXIT STATUS

As long as all documents processed result in some output, even if that output includes errata (a "POD ERRORS" section generated with "--errors=pod"), pod2text will exit with status 0. If any of the documents being processed do not result in an output document, pod2text will exit with status 1. If there are syntax errors in a POD document being processed and the error handling style is set to the default of "die", pod2text will abort immediately with exit status 255.

DIAGNOSTICS

If pod2text fails with errors, see Pod::Text and Pod::Simple for information about what those errors might mean. Internally, it can also produce the following diagnostics:

-c (--color) requires Term::ANSIColor be installed: (F) -c or --color were given, but Term::ANSIColor could not be loaded.
Unknown option: %s: (F) An unknown command line option was given.

In addition, other Getopt::Long error messages may result from invalid command-line options.

ENVIRONMENT

COLUMNS: If -t is given, pod2text will take the current width of your screen from this environment variable, if available. It overrides terminal width information in TERMCAP.
TERMCAP: If -t is given, pod2text will use the contents of this environment variable if available to determine the correct formatting sequences for your current terminal device.