this, that and the other thing.<text:span 
text:style-name="footnote reference"> ...rest of footnote code </text:span> maybe more text here.
 

##</code><code>##

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use OpenOffice::OODoc;

my $document = ooDocument( file => "testdoc.sxw");

## search recursively for footnote elements
## (I think both XML::Twig and OpenOffice::OODoc 
## have methods for doing this, but this is working for me now...
sub foot_find {
    my ( $elem, $arrayref )  = @_;

    unless ( ref $elem ) {
        return;
    }
    if ( $elem->att("text:style-name") &&
             ($elem->att("text:style-name") eq "footnote reference" )) {
        push( @$arrayref, $elem );
    }

    my @entities = $elem->children("text:span");
     foreach ( @entities ) {
         foot_find( $_ , $arrayref );
     }
} 

# This returns a list of XML::Twig::Elt objects
my @all = $document->getTextElementList;

# build list of footnote elements
my @foots;
foreach ( @all ) {
     foot_find( $_, \@foots );
}

#select footnotes with punctuation problems
grep { $_->prev_sibling_text =~ m<([,.])\s*$> } @foots;

 foreach ( @foots ) {
     my $pre    = $_->sibling(-1);
     my $post   = $_->sibling(1);

     unless ( $pre && $post ) {
         print "problem with pre or post\n";
         next;
     }

     ### this is a problem, because sometimes 
     ### the next element does not contain text
     unless ( $pre->text && $post->text ){
         print "No text around before and-or after\n";
         next;
     }

     ### this is the crux of the whole thing, and is what I would 
     ### like to improve. The subs_text method seems like a hack in
     ### this case.
     my $replace;
     my $simple_punct = qr/([,.])\s*$/;
     if ( $pre->text =~ $simple_punct ) {
         $replace = $1;
     }
     print $replace."\n" if $replace;
     $pre->subs_text( $simple_punct, '' );
     $post->subs_text( qr/^/, 
                       "$replace" );
}
$document->save("output.sxw");


##</code><code>##

sub jf { print substr($_[0], -1);
               jf( substr($_[0], 0, length($_[0])-1))
                    if length $_[0] > 1; }
jf('gro.alubaf@yehaf');