Perl index

[szabgab]

In every class I teach I always get into trouble when asked how to locate the documentation of a keyword, or if a keyword exists at all?

For functions its easy using perldoc -f XYZ but how can one find the syntax of while, basename or echo?
Is there a max function in Perl ?

Pointing to the specific docs for the specific keywords does not help as I need to tell them how can they find the docs.

So I created Perl index that should provide an index to all the keywords mentioned (or not) in the Perl documentation.

The source of it is a hand made yaml file from which I create a pod file that is then goes through Pod:Html.

If this is useful then let this be my present to the Perl community for Shavuot

ps. A lot of work is still needed, but it is already usable.

[diotalevi]

I wrote a test script for your YAML. It checks for completeness. There's a bunch of omissions in your YAML file.

Read more... (11 kB)

Updated Steve_p - added readmore tags

[szabgab]

thanks, that's huge help ...
more work ahead with the index
Could it also test for the exportable functions of all the standard modules ... ?


thanks for the other suggestions such as STDIN too...

[diotalevi]

I don't have any list of exportables from core perl modules. That's actually kind of hard because modules change more frequently than perl and its difficult to programatically detect what the exports are.

[TedPride]

I've bookmarked your index for future use. What I've been using up til now is http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl/pod/perl.pod, taking the links to perlfunc http://search.cpan.org/~nwclark/perl-5.8.7/pod/perlfunc.pod or perlvar http://search.cpan.org/~nwclark/perl-5.8.7/pod/perlvar.pod. From there I can just do a find for the items I'm looking for.

[blokhead]

Well done!

... or if a keyword exists at all?

For that task I have found diotalevi's B::Keywords module extremely convenient (I don't even have it installed, I just browse the source in my web browser).

It also lists a few other things you may want to include links for, like STDOUT, STDIN, STDERR, __DATA__, __FILE__, __END__, etc...

[kaif]

Wow++! I will find this incredibly useful.

My only recommendation is that m//, s///, tr//, and such include deep links into perlop (for example, here's the match operator). Those are the non-functions I look up most often.

[ghenry]

Hi,

Have you thought of working with jj808 to get this or something similar onto perldoc?

There's no point in duplicating the effort ;-)

[szabgab]

yep, JJ and I already talked about this but I told him to wait till I collect enough XPs for my post...

But as you can see all the links from the index go (or should go) to http://perldoc.perl.org

[QM]

I noticed that your index is sorted case sensitively. For instance, STDIN comes before Scope. Is that what you intended?