Spell(3) User Contributed Perl Documentation Spell(3)NAMEPod::Spell-- a formatter for spellchecking Pod
SYNOPSIS
% podspell Thing.pm | ispell
or if you don't have a podspell:
% perl -MPod::Spell -e "Pod::Spell->new->parse_from_file(shift)" Thing.pm |spell |fmt
or:
% perl -MPod::Spell -e "Pod::Spell->new->parse_from_filehandle"
...which takes POD on STDIN and sends formatted text to STDOUT
...or instead of piping to spell or ispell, use ">temp.txt", and open
temp.txt in your word processor for spell-checking.
DESCRIPTIONPod::Spell is a Pod formatter whose output is good for spellchecking.
Pod::Spell rather like Pod::Text, except that it doesn't put much
effort into actual formatting, and it suppresses things that look like
Perl symbols or Perl jargon (so that your spellchecking program won't
complain about mystery words like "$thing" or ""Foo::Bar"" or
"hashref").
This class provides no new public methods. All methods of interest are
inherited from Pod::Parser (which see). The especially interesting
ones are "parse_from_filehandle" (which without arguments takes from
STDIN and sends to STDOUT) and "parse_from_file". But you can probably
just make do with the examples in the synopsis though.
This class works by filtering out words that look like Perl or any form
of computerese (like "$thing" or ""N>7"" or ""@{$foo}{'bar','baz'}"",
anything in C<...> or F<...> codes, anything in verbatim paragraphs
(codeblocks), and anything in the stopword list. The default stopword
list for a document starts out from the stopword list defined by
Pod::Wordlist, and can be supplemented (on a per-document basis) by
having "=for stopwords" / "=for :stopwords" region(s) in a document.
ADDING STOPWORDS
You can add stopwords on a per-document basis with "=for stopwords" /
"=for :stopwords" regions, like so:
=for stopwords plok Pringe zorch snik !qux
foo bar baz quux quuux
This adds every word in that paragraph after "stopwords" to the
stopword list, effective for the rest of the document. In such a list,
words are whitespace-separated. (The amount of whitespace doesn't
matter, as long as there's no blank lines in the middle of the
paragraph.) Words beginning with "!" are deleted from the stopword
list -- so "!qux" deletes "qux" from the stopword list, if it was in
there in the first place. Note that if a stopword is all-lowercase,
then it means that it's okay in any case; but if the word has any
capital letters, then it means that it's okay only with that case. So
a wordlist entry of "perl" would permit "perl", "Perl", and (less
interestingly) "PERL", "pERL", "PerL", et cetera. However, a wordlist
entry of "Perl" catches only "Perl", not "perl". So if you wanted to
make sure you said only "Perl", never "perl", you could add this to the
top of your document:
=for stopwords !perl Perl
Then all instances of the word "Perl" would be weeded out of the
Pod::Spell-formatted version of your document, but any instances of the
word "perl" would be left in (unless they were in a C<...> or F<...>
style).
You can have several "=for stopwords" regions in your document. You
can even express them like so:
=begin stopwords
plok Pringe zorch
snik !qux
foo bar
baz quux quuux
=end stopwords
If you want to use E<...> sequences in a "stopwords" region, you have
to use ":stopwords", as here:
=for :stopwords
virtE<ugrave>
...meaning that you're adding a stopword of "virtu". If you left the
":" out, that'd mean you were adding a stopword of "virtE<ugrave>"
(with a literal E, a literal <, etc), which will have no effect, since
any occurrences of virtE<ugrave> don't look like a normal human-
language word anyway, and so would be screened out before the stopword
list is consulted anyway.
USING Pod::Spell
My personal advice:
· Write your documentation in Pod. Pod is described in perlpod. And
perlmodstyle has some advice on content. This is the stage where
you want to make sure you say everything you should, have good and
working examples, and have coherent grammar.
· Run it through podchecker. This will report all sorts of problems
with your Pod; you may choose to ignore some of these problems.
Some, like "*** WARNING: Unknown entity E<qacute>...", you should
pay attention to.
· Once podchecker errors have been tended to, spellcheck the pod by
running it through podspell / Pod::Spell. For any misspellings
that are reported in the Pod::Spell-formatted text, fix them in the
original. Repeat until there's no complaints.
· Run it through podchecker again just for good measure.
SEE ALSO
Pod::Wordlist
Pod::Parser
podchecker also known as Pod::Checker
perlpod, perlpodspec
HINT
If you feed output of Pod::Spell into your word processor and run a
spell-check, make sure you're not also running a grammar-check --
because Pod::Spell drops words that it thinks are Perl symbols, jargon,
or stopwords, this means you'll have ungrammatical sentences, what with
words being missing and all. And you don't need a grammar checker to
tell you that.
COPYRIGHT AND DISCLAIMER
Copyright (c) 2001 Sean M. Burke. All rights reserved.
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
The programs and documentation in this dist are distributed in the hope
that they will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the
implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular
purpose.
AUTHOR
Sean M. Burke "sburke@cpan.org"
perl v5.14.0 2001-10-27 Spell(3)
