NAME

       PPI::Token::Whitespace - Tokens representing ordinary white space

INHERITANCE

         PPI::Token::Whitespace
         isa PPI::Token
             isa PPI::Element

DESCRIPTION

       As a full "round-trip" parser, PPI records every last byte in a file and ensure that it is
       included in the PPI::Document object.

       This even includes whitespace. In fact, Perl documents are seen as "floating in a sea of
       whitespace", and thus any document will contain vast quantities of
       "PPI::Token::Whitespace" objects.

       For the most part, you shouldn't notice them. Or at least, you shouldn't have to notice
       them.

       This means doing things like consistently using the "S for significant" series of
       PPI::Node and PPI::Element methods to do things.

       If you want the nth child element, you should be using "schild" rather than "child", and
       likewise "snext_sibling", "sprevious_sibling", and so on and so forth.

METHODS

       Again, for the most part you should really not need to do anything very significant with
       whitespace.

       But there are a couple of convenience methods provided, beyond those provided by the
       parent PPI::Token and PPI::Element classes.

   null
       Because PPI sees documents as sitting on a sort of substrate made of whitespace, there are
       a couple of corner cases that get particularly nasty if they don't find whitespace in
       certain places.

       Imagine walking down the beach to go into the ocean, and then quite unexpectedly falling
       off the side of the planet. Well it's somewhat equivalent to that, including the whole
       screaming death bit.

       The "null" method is a convenience provided to get some internals out of some of these
       corner cases.

       Specifically it create a whitespace token that represents nothing, or at least the null
       string ''. It's a handy way to have some "whitespace" right where you need it, without
       having to have any actual characters.

   tidy
       "tidy" is a convenience method for removing unneeded whitespace.

       Specifically, it removes any whitespace from the end of a line.

       Note that this doesn't include POD, where you may well need to keep certain types of
       whitespace. The entire POD chunk lives in its own PPI::Token::Pod object.

SUPPORT

       See the support section in the main module.

AUTHOR

       Adam Kennedy <adamk@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright 2001 - 2011 Adam Kennedy.

       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same
       terms as Perl itself.

       The full text of the license can be found in the LICENSE file included with this module.