PERL Beginners - All of "perldoc" to text

Author

All of "perldoc" to text

Bryan R Harris

2006-11-01, 6:57 pm

"perldoc" to me has always been this kind of magicians hat where you wave a
wand and chant some special words and magically out pops some thing you
never read or heard before. Also surprising is how detailed it is, it seems
to have things that even the Perl Bookshelf doesn't.

Is it possible to somehow pipe the whole thing into a text editor so I can
scan or read the whole thing?

Thanks.

- Bryan

Tom Phoenix

2006-11-01, 6:57 pm

On 11/1/06, Bryan R Harris <Bryan_R_Harris@raytheon.com> wrote:

> "perldoc" to me has always been this kind of magicians hat where you
> wave a wand and chant some special words and magically out pops
> some thing you never read or heard before.

> Is it possible to somehow pipe the whole thing into a text editor so
> I can scan or read the whole thing?

Certainly. The command 'perldoc perldoc' will list the command line
options for perldoc; one of those will let you choose plain text or
another form of output.

Alternatively, you could write your own program, possibly using one or
more modules, to locate and render pod files. There are several
modules on CPAN for pod.

Is that all you needed? Hope this helps!

--Tom Phoenix
Stonehenge Perl Training

Daniel

2006-11-02, 7:56 am

Hello,
yes you can pipe the desired sections(or all sections) to col -b >
outputfile, to edit or less or more outputfile :-) however you can
access the treasure right here on the web aswell:
http://perldoc.perl.org/ where you can read, or dl(~16M) a tarball to
read offline.
Happy perling

Tom Phoenix wrote:
> On 11/1/06, Bryan R Harris <Bryan_R_Harris@raytheon.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> Certainly. The command 'perldoc perldoc' will list the command line
> options for perldoc; one of those will let you choose plain text or
> another form of output.
>
> Alternatively, you could write your own program, possibly using one or
> more modules, to locate and render pod files. There are several
> modules on CPAN for pod.
>
> Is that all you needed? Hope this helps!
>
> --Tom Phoenix
> Stonehenge Perl Training

Zentara

2006-11-02, 7:56 am

On Wed, 01 Nov 2006 15:03:59 -0700, Bryan_R_Harris@raytheon.com (Bryan R
Harris) wrote:

>
>
>"perldoc" to me has always been this kind of magicians hat where you wave a
>wand and chant some special words and magically out pops some thing you
>never read or heard before. Also surprising is how detailed it is, it seems
>to have things that even the Perl Bookshelf doesn't.
>
>Is it possible to somehow pipe the whole thing into a text editor so I can
>scan or read the whole thing?

You might like to try the Tk-Pod

http://search.cpan.org/search?query=Tk-Pod&mode=all

which opens up the perldocs in a Tk window, and lets
you flip thru and search them.

--
I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
http://zentara.net/japh.html

Bryan R Harris

2006-11-02, 9:57 pm

> On 11/1/06, Bryan R Harris <Bryan_R_Harris@raytheon.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> Certainly. The command 'perldoc perldoc' will list the command line
> options for perldoc; one of those will let you choose plain text or
> another form of output.
>
> Alternatively, you could write your own program, possibly using one or
> more modules, to locate and render pod files. There are several
> modules on CPAN for pod.
>
> Is that all you needed? Hope this helps!

I think I see how to get them in plain text, but how do I get *all* of them?
I barely know how to use "perldoc -q" and "perldoc -f", is there a way to
get perldoc to dump *everything* it knows into a huge text file?

- B

Tom Phoenix

2006-11-02, 9:57 pm

On 11/2/06, Bryan R Harris <Bryan_R_Harris@raytheon.com> wrote:

> is there a way to get perldoc to dump *everything* it knows
> into a huge text file?

In addition to the core Perl documentation, which is a large set of
pod files, nearly all modules have their own documentation files
(usually with .pod or .pm extensions).

Although perldoc doesn't (to my knowledge) have an ability to dump all
of these, nevertheless it should be a simple matter to find and
process the ones you're interested in (via File::Find, perhaps).

Good luck with it!

--Tom Phoenix
Stonehenge Perl Training

Arnaldo Guzman

2006-11-02, 9:57 pm

On Thu, 2006-11-02 at 11:02 -0700, Bryan R Harris wrote:
>
>
> I think I see how to get them in plain text, but how do I get *all* of them?
> I barely know how to use "perldoc -q" and "perldoc -f", is there a way to
> get perldoc to dump *everything* it knows into a huge text file?

You shouldn't need to do this, and some users have already given you
some suggestions. Here's some examples of how to use perldoc:

You need to know more about substr()?

$ perldoc -f substr

You don't know exactly what oct() does?

$ perldoc -f oct

Have a question that might be found in the FAQ?

$ perldoc -q reference

I hope that will get you started. Also; I believe Tom Pheonix has told
you, but to learn how to use perldoc, type "perldoc perldoc". :-)

Tommy Nordgren

2006-11-02, 9:57 pm

On 1 nov 2006, at 23.03, Bryan R Harris wrote:

>
>
> "perldoc" to me has always been this kind of magicians hat where
> you wave a
> wand and chant some special words and magically out pops some thing
> you
> never read or heard before. Also surprising is how detailed it is,
> it seems
> to have things that even the Perl Bookshelf doesn't.
>
> Is it possible to somehow pipe the whole thing into a text editor
> so I can
> scan or read the whole thing?
>
> Thanks.
>
> - Bryan
>
>
>

If you are in the unix world, try the included script. It will
prettyprint the docs for any module
to a Postscript printer.

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