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Pod to HTML

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OK, so there were already a thousand solutions for converting pod to HTML, but I wasn’t especially happy with any of them. Things I wanted were:

  • Clean-looking XHTML and/or HTML5 output.
  • Unicode support. ☻
  • Good syntax highlighting for Perl code samples within the pod.
  • Links to metacpan.org by default rather than search.cpan.org.

And so I’ve cobbled together a solution using Pod::Simple, PPI::HTML, HTML::HTML5::Parser, HTML::HTML5::Writer, XML::LibXML::PrettyPrint and Moo, and released it as TOBYINK::Pod::HTML.

Here’s the example from the synopsis section:

 1:     #!/usr/bin/perl
 2:     
 3:     use strict;
 4:     use warnings;
 5:     use TOBYINK::Pod::HTML;
 6:     
 7:     my $pod2html = "TOBYINK::Pod::HTML"->new(
 8:         pretty             => 1,       # nicely indented HTML
 9:         code_highlighting  => 1,       # use PPI::HTML
10:         code_line_numbers  => undef,
11:         code_styles        => {        # some CSS
12:             comment   => 'color:green',
13:             keyword   => 'font-weight:bold',
14:         }
15:     );
16:     
17:     print $pod2html->file_to_html(__FILE__);

There’s a basic command-line script pod2html-tobyink supplied with it.

Oh, and this blog post was written as pod and converted to HTML.