http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=954149

... or how to find X<>-refs in Pod and search them in pager

Problem

Did you ever try to find the documentation of the ".." (flip-flop) operator?

typing perldoc -f .. doesn't help ...

$ perldoc -f .. No documentation for perl function `..' found
But perldocs have tags like X<..> indicating the right documentation, only the formatters are missing.

Previous discussions

  • [perldoc] keyword search or
  • So whats new about pod and X<>-tag? How to check current development?

    Approach

  • Grep core-Pods for X<TAGS>.

  • Insert marker in front of every hit.

  • Call pager (here less) with default search pattern to find those markers.

    Usage

  • type pdoc qr to find all references for qr.

  • Typing n and N will jump from marker to marker.

  • After quitting a manpage qthe next is built and displayed

    Prove of concept

    Just a hack ("release often" dogma)

    Tested for linux.

    file "pdoc"
    #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; # use Data::Dump; my $poddir = `perldoc -l perltoc`; chomp $poddir; $poddir =~ s/perltoc/*/; my $pattern = $ARGV[0]; my @pods= grep {! /perltoc/} `grep -l -F 'X<$pattern>' $poddir`; chomp @pods; # dd @pods; for my $infile (@pods) { open my $in, "<", $infile; my $outfile = "/tmp/". (split "/",$infile)[-1]; open my $out,">", $outfile; local $/="\n\n"; my $marker = ">>> X<$pattern> <<<"; #"MARK"; while (my $para = <$in>){ print $out "\nC<<<< $marker >>>>\n\n" if $para =~ /X<\Q$pattern\E>/; print $out $para; } close $out; my $ret = `pod2man $outfile |nroff -man > /tmp/tmp.man`; print system("less -p \"$marker\" /tmp/tmp.man") }

    Cheers Rolf