NAME

Pod::Elemental - work with nestable Pod elements

VERSION

version 0.103005

SYNOPSIS

  use Pod::Elemental;
  use Pod::Elemental::Transformer::Pod5;

  my $document = Pod::Elemental->read_file('lib/Pod/Elemental.pm');

  Pod::Elemental::Transformer::Pod5->new->transform_node($document);

  print $document->as_debug_string, "\n"; # quick overview of doc structure

  print $document->as_pod_string, "\n";   # reproduce the document in Pod

DESCRIPTION

Pod::Elemental is a system for treating a Pod (plain old documentation) documents as trees of elements. This model may be familiar from many other document systems, especially the HTML DOM. Pod::Elemental's document object model is much less sophisticated than the HTML DOM, but still makes a lot of document transformations easy.

In general, you'll want to read in a Pod document and then perform a number of prepackaged transformations on it. The most common of these will be the Pod5 transformation, which assumes that the basic meaning of Pod commands described in the Perl 5 documentation hold: "=begin", "=end", and "=for" commands mark regions of the document, leading whitespace marks a verbatim paragraph, and so on. The Pod5 transformer also eliminates the need to track elements representing vertical whitespace.