Pro Perl

CHAPTER 18Text Processing, Documentation, and Reports

We have seen a lot of Perl's native capabilities in terms of interpolation and regular expressions. However, these are just the start of Perl's text processing capabilities.

Perl comes with a standard library of text processing modules that solve many common problems associated with manipulating text. These include such tasks as tab expansion, determining abbreviations, and paragraph formatting. While not necessarily advanced, they provide a simple way of performing useful functions without reinventing the wheel.

Another class of text processing modules is dedicated to understanding Perl's documentation syntax known as POD, or Plain Old Documentation. The Pod:: family of Perl modules enable ...