POD2TEXT(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide POD2TEXT(1)
NAME
pod2text - Convert POD data to formatted ASCII text
SYNOPSIS
pod2text [-aclostu] [--code] [-e encoding]
[--errors=style] [--guesswork=rule[,rule...]]
[-i indent] [-q quotes]
[--nourls] [--stderr] [-w width] [input [output ...]]
pod2text -h
DESCRIPTION
pod2text is a wrapper script around the Pod::Text and its subclasses.
It uses them to generate formatted text from POD source. It can
optionally use either termcap sequences or ANSI color escape sequences
to format the text.
input is the file to read for POD source (the POD can be embedded in
code). If input isn't given, it defaults to "STDIN". output, if
given, is the file to which to write the formatted output. If output
isn't given, the formatted output is written to "STDOUT". Several POD
files can be processed in the same pod2text invocation (saving module
load and compile times) by providing multiple pairs of input and output
files on the command line.
By default, the output encoding is the same as the encoding of the
input file, or UTF-8 if that encoding is not set (except on EBCDIC
systems). See the -e option to explicitly set the output encoding and
"Encoding" in Pod::Text for more discussion.
OPTIONS
Each option is annotated with the version of podlators in which that
option was added with its current meaning.
-a, --alt
[1.00] Use an alternate output format that, among other things,
uses a different heading style and marks "=item" entries with a
colon in the left margin.
--code
[1.11] Include any non-POD text from the input file in the output
as well. Useful for viewing code documented with POD blocks with
the POD rendered and the code left intact.
-c, --color
[1.00] Format the output with ANSI color escape sequences. Using
this option requires that Term::ANSIColor be installed on your
system.
-e encoding, --encoding=encoding
[5.00] Specifies the encoding of the output. encoding must be an
encoding recognized by the Encode module (see Encode::Supported).
If the output contains characters that cannot be represented in
this encoding, that is an error that will be reported as configured
by the "errors" option. If error handling is other than "die", the
unrepresentable character will be replaced with the Encode
substitution character (normally "?").
WARNING: The input encoding of the POD source is independent from
the output encoding, and setting this option does not affect the
interpretation of the POD input. Unless your POD source is US-
ASCII, its encoding should be declared with the "=encoding" command
in the source, as near to the top of the file as possible. If this
is not done, Pod::Simple will will attempt to guess the encoding
and may be successful if it's Latin-1 or UTF-8, but it will produce
warnings. See perlpod(1) for more information.
--errors=style
[2.5.0] Set the error handling style. "die" says to throw an
exception on any POD formatting error. "stderr" says to report
errors on standard error, but not to throw an exception. "pod"
says to include a POD ERRORS section in the resulting documentation
summarizing the errors. "none" ignores POD errors entirely, as
much as possible.
The default is "die".
--guesswork=rule[,rule...]
[5.01] By default, pod2text applies some default formatting rules
based on guesswork and regular expressions that are intended to
make writing Perl documentation easier and require less explicit
markup. These rules may not always be appropriate, particularly
for documentation that isn't about Perl. This option allows
turning all or some of it off.
The special rule "all" enables all guesswork. This is also the
default for backward compatibility reasons. The special rule
"none" disables all guesswork. Otherwise, the value of this option
should be a comma-separated list of one or more of the following
keywords:
quoting
If no guesswork is enabled, any text enclosed in C<> is
surrounded by double quotes in nroff (terminal) output unless
the contents are already quoted. When this guesswork is
enabled, quote marks will also be suppressed for Perl
variables, function names, function calls, numbers, and hex
constants.
Any unknown guesswork name is silently ignored (for potential
future compatibility), so be careful about spelling.
-i indent, --indent=indent
[1.00] Set the number of spaces to indent regular text, and the
default indentation for "=over" blocks. Defaults to 4 spaces if
this option isn't given.
-h, --help
[1.00] Print out usage information and exit.
-l, --loose
[1.00] Print a blank line after a "=head1" heading. Normally, no
blank line is printed after "=head1", although one is still printed
after "=head2", because this is the expected formatting for manual
pages; if you're formatting arbitrary text documents, using this
option is recommended.
-m width, --left-margin=width, --margin=width
[1.24] The width of the left margin in spaces. Defaults to 0.
This is the margin for all text, including headings, not the amount
by which regular text is indented; for the latter, see -i option.
--nourls
[2.5.0] Normally, L<> formatting codes with a URL but anchor text
are formatted to show both the anchor text and the URL. In other
words:
L<foo|http://example.com/>
is formatted as:
foo <http://example.com/>
This flag, if given, suppresses the URL when anchor text is given,
so this example would be formatted as just "foo". This can produce
less cluttered output in cases where the URLs are not particularly
important.
-o, --overstrike
[1.06] Format the output with overstrike printing. Bold text is
rendered as character, backspace, character. Italics and file
names are rendered as underscore, backspace, character. Many
pagers, such as less, know how to convert this to bold or
underlined text.
-q quotes, --quotes=quotes
[4.00] Sets the quote marks used to surround C<> text to quotes.
If quotes is a single character, it is used as both the left and
right quote. Otherwise, it is split in half, and the first half of
the string is used as the left quote and the second is used as the
right quote.
quotes may also be set to the special value "none", in which case
no quote marks are added around C<> text.
-s, --sentence
[1.00] Assume each sentence ends with two spaces and try to
preserve that spacing. Without this option, all consecutive
whitespace in non-verbatim paragraphs is compressed into a single
space.
--stderr
[2.1.3] By default, pod2text dies if any errors are detected in the
POD input. If --stderr is given and no --errors flag is present,
errors are sent to standard error, but pod2text does not abort.
This is equivalent to "--errors=stderr" and is supported for
backward compatibility.
-t, --termcap
[1.00] Try to determine the width of the screen and the bold and
underline sequences for the terminal from termcap, and use that
information in formatting the output. Output will be wrapped at
two columns less than the width of your terminal device. Using
this option requires that your system have a termcap file somewhere
where Term::Cap can find it and requires that your system support
termios. With this option, the output of pod2text will contain
terminal control sequences for your current terminal type.
-u, --utf8
[2.2.0] Set the output encoding to UTF-8. This is equivalent to
"--encoding=UTF-8" and is supported for backward compatibility.
-w, --width=width, -width
[1.00] The column at which to wrap text on the right-hand side.
Defaults to 76, unless -t is given, in which case it's two columns
less than the width of your terminal device.
EXIT STATUS
As long as all documents processed result in some output, even if that
output includes errata (a "POD ERRORS" section generated with
"--errors=pod"), pod2text will exit with status 0. If any of the
documents being processed do not result in an output document, pod2text
will exit with status 1. If there are syntax errors in a POD document
being processed and the error handling style is set to the default of
"die", pod2text will abort immediately with exit status 255.
DIAGNOSTICS
If pod2text fails with errors, see Pod::Text and Pod::Simple for
information about what those errors might mean. Internally, it can
also produce the following diagnostics:
-c (--color) requires Term::ANSIColor be installed
(F) -c or --color were given, but Term::ANSIColor could not be
loaded.
Unknown option: %s
(F) An unknown command line option was given.
In addition, other Getopt::Long error messages may result from invalid
command-line options.
ENVIRONMENT
COLUMNS
If -t is given, pod2text will take the current width of your screen
from this environment variable, if available. It overrides
terminal width information in TERMCAP.
TERMCAP
If -t is given, pod2text will use the contents of this environment
variable if available to determine the correct formatting sequences
for your current terminal device.
AUTHOR
Russ Allbery <rra@cpan.org>.
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
Copyright 1999-2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012-2019, 2022 Russ
Allbery <rra@cpan.org>
This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
SEE ALSO
Encode::Supported, Pod::Text, Pod::Text::Color, Pod::Text::Overstrike,
Pod::Text::Termcap, Pod::Simple, perlpod(1)
The current version of this script is always available from its web
site at <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/podlators/>. It is also
part of the Perl core distribution as of 5.6.0.
perl v5.38.2 2025-07-25 POD2TEXT(1)
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