Provided by: libppi-perl_1.215-1_all bug

NAME

       PPI - Parse, Analyze and Manipulate Perl (without perl)

SYNOPSIS

         use PPI;

         # Create a new empty document
         my $Document = PPI::Document->new;

         # Create a document from source
         $Document = PPI::Document->new(\'print "Hello World!\n"');

         # Load a Document from a file
         $Document = PPI::Document->new('Module.pm');

         # Does it contain any POD?
         if ( $Document->find_any('PPI::Token::Pod') ) {
             print "Module contains POD\n";
         }

         # Get the name of the main package
         $pkg = $Document->find_first('PPI::Statement::Package')->namespace;

         # Remove all that nasty documentation
         $Document->prune('PPI::Token::Pod');
         $Document->prune('PPI::Token::Comment');

         # Save the file
         $Document->save('Module.pm.stripped');

DESCRIPTION

   About this Document
       This is the PPI manual. It describes its reason for existing, its general structure, its
       use, an overview of the API, and provides a few implementation samples.

   Background
       The ability to read, and manipulate Perl (the language) programmatically other than with
       perl (the application) was one that caused difficulty for a long time.

       The cause of this problem was Perl's complex and dynamic grammar.  Although there is
       typically not a huge diversity in the grammar of most Perl code, certain issues cause
       large problems when it comes to parsing.

       Indeed, quite early in Perl's history Tom Christenson introduced the Perl community to the
       quote "Nothing but perl can parse Perl", or as it is more often stated now as a truism:

       "Only perl can parse Perl"

       One example of the sorts of things the prevent Perl being easily parsed are function
       signatures, as demonstrated by the following.

         @result = (dothis $foo, $bar);

         # Which of the following is it equivalent to?
         @result = (dothis($foo), $bar);
         @result = dothis($foo, $bar);

       The first line above can be interpreted in two different ways, depending on whether the
       &dothis function is expecting one argument, or two, or several.

       A "code parser" (something that parses for the purpose of execution) such as perl needs
       information that is not found in the immediate vicinity of the statement being parsed.

       The information might not just be elsewhere in the file, it might not even be in the same
       file at all. It might also not be able to determine this information without the prior
       execution of a "BEGIN {}" block, or the loading and execution of one or more external
       modules. Or worse the &dothis function may not even have been written yet.

       When parsing Perl as code, you must also execute it

       Even perl itself never really fully understands the structure of the source code after and
       indeed as it processes it, and in that sense doesn't "parse" Perl source into anything
       remotely like a structured document.  This makes it of no real use for any task that needs
       to treat the source code as a document, and do so reliably and robustly.

       For more information on why it is impossible to parse perl, see Randal Schwartz's seminal
       response to the question of "Why can't you parse Perl".

       <http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=44722>

       The purpose of PPI is not to parse Perl Code, but to parse Perl Documents. By treating the
       problem this way, we are able to parse a single file containing Perl source code
       "isolated" from any other resources, such as libraries upon which the code may depend, and
       without needing to run an instance of perl alongside or inside the parser.

       Historically, using an embedded perl parser was widely considered to be the most likely
       avenue for finding a solution to "Parse::Perl". It was investigated from time to time and
       attempts have generally failed or suffered from sufficiently bad corner cases that they
       were abandoned.

   What Does PPI Stand For?
       "PPI" is an acronym for the longer original module name "Parse::Perl::Isolated". And in
       the spirit or the silly acronym games played by certain unnamed Open Source projects you
       may have hurd of, it also a reverse backronym of "I Parse Perl".

       Of course, I could just be lying and have just made that second bit up 10 minutes before
       the release of PPI 1.000. Besides, all the cool Perl packages have TLAs (Three Letter
       Acronyms). It's a rule or something.

       Why don't you just think of it as the Perl Parsing Interface for simplicity.

       The original name was shortened to prevent the author (and you the users) from contracting
       RSI by having to type crazy things like
       "Parse::Perl::Isolated::Token::QuoteLike::Backtick" 100 times a day.

       In acknowledgment that someone may some day come up with a valid solution for the grammar
       problem it was decided at the commencement of the project to leave the "Parse::Perl"
       namespace free for any such effort.

       Since that time I've been able to prove to my own satisfaction that it is truly impossible
       to accurately parse Perl as both code and document at once. For the academics, parsing
       Perl suffers from the "Halting Problem".

       With this in mind "Parse::Perl" has now been co-opted as the title for the SourceForge
       project that publishes PPI and a large collection of other applications and modules
       related to the (document) parsing of Perl source code.

       You can find this project at <http://sf.net/projects/parseperl>, however we no longer use
       the SourceForge CVS server.  Instead, the current development version of PPI is available
       via SVN at <http://svn.ali.as/cpan/trunk/PPI/>.

   Why Parse Perl?
       Once you can accept that we will never be able to parse Perl well enough to meet the
       standards of things that treat Perl as code, it is worth re-examining "why" we want to
       "parse" Perl at all.

       What are the things that people might want a "Perl parser" for.

       Documentation
           Analyzing the contents of a Perl document to automatically generate documentation, in
           parallel to, or as a replacement for, POD documentation.

           Allow an indexer to to locate and process all the comments and documentation from code
           for "full text search" applications.

       Structural and Quality Analysis
           Determine quality or other metrics across a body of code, and identify situations
           relating to particular phrases, techniques or locations.

           Index functions, variables and packages within Perl code, and doing search and graph
           (in the node/edge sense) analysis of large code bases.

       Refactoring
           Make structural, syntax, or other changes to code in an automated manner, either
           independently or in assistance to an editor. This sort of task list includes
           backporting, forward porting, partial evaluation, "improving" code, or whatever. All
           the sort of things you'd want from a Perl::Editor.

       Layout
           Change the layout of code without changing its meaning. This includes techniques such
           as tidying (like perltidy), obfuscation, compressing and "squishing", or to implement
           formatting preferences or policies.

       Presentation
           This includes methods of improving the presentation of code, without changing the
           content of the code. Modify, improve, syntax colour etc the presentation of a Perl
           document. Generating "IntelliText"-like functions.

       If we treat this as a baseline for the sort of things we are going to have to build on top
       of Perl, then it becomes possible to identify a standard for how good a Perl parser needs
       to be.

   How good is Good Enough(TM)
       PPI seeks to be good enough to achieve all of the above tasks, or to provide a
       sufficiently good API on which to allow others to implement modules in these and related
       areas.

       However, there are going to be limits to this process. Because PPI cannot adapt to
       changing grammars, any code written using source filters should not be assumed to be
       parsable.

       At one extreme, this includes anything munged by Acme::Bleach, as well as (arguably) more
       common cases like Switch. We do not pretend to be able to always parse code using these
       modules, although as long as it still follows a format that looks like Perl syntax, it may
       be possible to extend the lexer to handle them.

       The ability to extend PPI to handle lexical additions to the language is on the drawing
       board to be done some time post-1.0

       The goal for success was originally to be able to successfully parse 99% of all Perl
       documents contained in CPAN. This means the entire file in each case.

       PPI has succeeded in this goal far beyond the expectations of even the author. At time of
       writing there are only 28 non-Acme Perl modules in CPAN that PPI is incapable of parsing.
       Most of these are so badly broken they do not compile as Perl code anyway.

       So unless you are actively going out of your way to break PPI, you should expect that it
       will handle your code just fine.

   Internationalisation
       PPI provides partial support for internationalisation and localisation.

       Specifically, it allows the use characters from the Latin-1 character set to be used in
       quotes, comments, and POD. Primarily, this covers languages from Europe and South America.

       PPI does not currently provide support for Unicode, although there is an initial
       implementation available in a development branch from CVS.

       If you need Unicode support, and would like to help stress test the Unicode support so we
       can move it to the main branch and enable it in the main release should contact the
       author. (contact details below)

   Round Trip Safe
       When PPI parses a file it builds everything into the model, including whitespace. This is
       needed in order to make the Document fully "Round Trip" safe.

       The general concept behind a "Round Trip" parser is that it knows what it is parsing is
       somewhat uncertain, and so expects to get things wrong from time to time. In the cases
       where it parses code wrongly the tree will serialize back out to the same string of code
       that was read in, repairing the parser's mistake as it heads back out to the file.

       The end result is that if you parse in a file and serialize it back out without changing
       the tree, you are guaranteed to get the same file you started with. PPI does this
       correctly and reliably for 100% of all known cases.

       What goes in, will come out. Every time.

       The one minor exception at this time is that if the newlines for your file are wrong
       (meaning not matching the platform newline format), PPI will localise them for you. (It
       isn't to be convenient, supporting arbitrary newlines would make some of the code more
       complicated)

       Better control of the newline type is on the wish list though, and anyone wanting to help
       out is encouraged to contact the author.

IMPLEMENTATION

   General Layout
       PPI is built upon two primary "parsing" components, PPI::Tokenizer and PPI::Lexer, and a
       large tree of about 50 classes which implement the various the Perl Document Object Model
       (PDOM).

       The PDOM is conceptually similar in style and intent to the regular DOM or other code
       Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs), but contains some differences to handle perl-specific cases,
       and to assist in treating the code as a document. Please note that it is not an
       implementation of the official Document Object Model specification, only somewhat similar
       to it.

       On top of the Tokenizer, Lexer and the classes of the PDOM, sit a number of classes
       intended to make life a little easier when dealing with PDOM trees.

       Both the major parsing components were hand-coded from scratch with only plain Perl code
       and a few small utility modules. There are no grammar or patterns mini-languages, no YACC
       or LEX style tools and only a small number of regular expressions.

       This is primarily because of the sheer volume of accumulated cruft that exists in Perl.
       Not even perl itself is capable of parsing Perl documents (remember, it just parses and
       executes it as code).

       As a result, PPI needed to be cruftier than perl itself. Feel free to shudder at this
       point, and hope you never have to understand the Tokenizer codebase. Speaking of which...

   The Tokenizer
       The Tokenizer takes source code and converts it into a series of tokens. It does this
       using a slow but thorough character by character manual process, rather than using a
       pattern system or complex regexes.

       Or at least it does so conceptually. If you were to actually trace the code you would find
       it's not truly character by character due to a number of regexps and optimisations
       throughout the code. This lets the Tokenizer "skip ahead" when it can find shortcuts, so
       it tends to jump around a line a bit wildly at times.

       In practice, the number of times the Tokenizer will actually move the character cursor
       itself is only about 5% - 10% higher than the number of tokens contained in the file. This
       makes it about as optimal as it can be made without implementing it in something other
       than Perl.

       In 2001 when PPI was started, this structure made PPI quite slow, and not really suitable
       for interactive tasks. This situation has improved greatly with multi-gigahertz
       processors, but can still be painful when working with very large files.

       The target parsing rate for PPI is about 5000 lines per gigacycle. It is currently
       believed to be at about 1500, and main avenue for making it to the target speed has now
       become PPI::XS, a drop-in XS accelerator for PPI.

       Since PPI::XS has only just gotten off the ground and is currently only at proof-of-
       concept stage, this may take a little while. Anyone interested in helping out with PPI::XS
       is highly encouraged to contact the author. In fact, the design of PPI::XS means it's
       possible to port one function at a time safely and reliably. So every little bit will
       help.

   The Lexer
       The Lexer takes a token stream, and converts it to a lexical tree. Because we are parsing
       Perl documents this includes whitespace, comments, and all number of weird things that
       have no relevance when code is actually executed.

       An instantiated PPI::Lexer consumes PPI::Tokenizer objects and produces PPI::Document
       objects. However you should probably never be working with the Lexer directly. You should
       just be able to create PPI::Document objects and work with them directly.

   The Perl Document Object Model
       The PDOM is a structured collection of data classes that together provide a correct and
       scalable model for documents that follow the standard Perl syntax.

   The PDOM Class Tree
       The following lists all of the 67 current PDOM classes, listing with indentation based on
       inheritance.

          PPI::Element
             PPI::Node
                PPI::Document
                   PPI::Document::Fragment
                PPI::Statement
                   PPI::Statement::Package
                   PPI::Statement::Include
                   PPI::Statement::Sub
                      PPI::Statement::Scheduled
                   PPI::Statement::Compound
                   PPI::Statement::Break
                   PPI::Statement::Given
                   PPI::Statement::When
                   PPI::Statement::Data
                   PPI::Statement::End
                   PPI::Statement::Expression
                      PPI::Statement::Variable
                   PPI::Statement::Null
                   PPI::Statement::UnmatchedBrace
                   PPI::Statement::Unknown
                PPI::Structure
                   PPI::Structure::Block
                   PPI::Structure::Subscript
                   PPI::Structure::Constructor
                   PPI::Structure::Condition
                   PPI::Structure::List
                   PPI::Structure::For
                   PPI::Structure::Given
                   PPI::Structure::When
                   PPI::Structure::Unknown
             PPI::Token
                PPI::Token::Whitespace
                PPI::Token::Comment
                PPI::Token::Pod
                PPI::Token::Number
                   PPI::Token::Number::Binary
                   PPI::Token::Number::Octal
                   PPI::Token::Number::Hex
                   PPI::Token::Number::Float
                      PPI::Token::Number::Exp
                   PPI::Token::Number::Version
                PPI::Token::Word
                PPI::Token::DashedWord
                PPI::Token::Symbol
                   PPI::Token::Magic
                PPI::Token::ArrayIndex
                PPI::Token::Operator
                PPI::Token::Quote
                   PPI::Token::Quote::Single
                   PPI::Token::Quote::Double
                   PPI::Token::Quote::Literal
                   PPI::Token::Quote::Interpolate
                PPI::Token::QuoteLike
                   PPI::Token::QuoteLike::Backtick
                   PPI::Token::QuoteLike::Command
                   PPI::Token::QuoteLike::Regexp
                   PPI::Token::QuoteLike::Words
                   PPI::Token::QuoteLike::Readline
                PPI::Token::Regexp
                   PPI::Token::Regexp::Match
                   PPI::Token::Regexp::Substitute
                   PPI::Token::Regexp::Transliterate
                PPI::Token::HereDoc
                PPI::Token::Cast
                PPI::Token::Structure
                PPI::Token::Label
                PPI::Token::Separator
                PPI::Token::Data
                PPI::Token::End
                PPI::Token::Prototype
                PPI::Token::Attribute
                PPI::Token::Unknown

       To summarize the above layout, all PDOM objects inherit from the PPI::Element class.

       Under this are PPI::Token, strings of content with a known type, and PPI::Node,
       syntactically significant containers that hold other Elements.

       The three most important of these are the PPI::Document, the PPI::Statement and the
       PPI::Structure classes.

   The Document, Statement and Structure
       At the top of all complete PDOM trees is a PPI::Document object. It represents a complete
       file of Perl source code as you might find it on disk.

       There are some specialised types of document, such as PPI::Document::File and
       PPI::Document::Normalized but for the purposes of the PDOM they are all just considered to
       be the same thing.

       Each Document will contain a number of Statements, Structures and Tokens.

       A PPI::Statement is any series of Tokens and Structures that are treated as a single
       contiguous statement by perl itself. You should note that a Statement is as close as PPI
       can get to "parsing" the code in the sense that perl-itself parses Perl code when it is
       building the op-tree.

       Because of the isolation and Perl's syntax, it is provably impossible for PPI to
       accurately determine precedence of operators or which tokens are implicit arguments to a
       sub call.

       So rather than lead you on with a bad guess that has a strong chance of being wrong, PPI
       does not attempt to determine precedence or sub parameters at all.

       At a fundamental level, it only knows that this series of elements represents a single
       Statement as perl sees it, but it can do so with enough certainty that it can be trusted.

       However, for specific Statement types the PDOM is able to derive additional useful
       information about their meaning. For the best, most useful, and most heavily used example,
       see PPI::Statement::Include.

       A PPI::Structure is any series of tokens contained within matching braces.  This includes
       code blocks, conditions, function argument braces, anonymous array and hash constructors,
       lists, scoping braces and all other syntactic structures represented by a matching pair of
       braces, including (although it may not seem obvious at first) "<READLINE>" braces.

       Each Structure contains none, one, or many Tokens and Structures (the rules for which vary
       for the different Structure subclasses)

       Under the PDOM structure rules, a Statement can never directly contain another child
       Statement, a Structure can never directly contain another child Structure, and a Document
       can never contain another Document anywhere in the tree.

       Aside from these three rules, the PDOM tree is extremely flexible.

   The PDOM at Work
       To demonstrate the PDOM in use lets start with an example showing how the tree might look
       for the following chunk of simple Perl code.

         #!/usr/bin/perl

         print( "Hello World!" );

         exit();

       Translated into a PDOM tree it would have the following structure (as shown via the
       included PPI::Dumper).

         PPI::Document
           PPI::Token::Comment                '#!/usr/bin/perl\n'
           PPI::Token::Whitespace             '\n'
           PPI::Statement::Expression
             PPI::Token::Bareword             'print'
             PPI::Structure::List             ( ... )
               PPI::Token::Whitespace         ' '
               PPI::Statement::Expression
                 PPI::Token::Quote::Double    '"Hello World!"'
               PPI::Token::Whitespace         ' '
             PPI::Token::Structure            ';'
           PPI::Token::Whitespace             '\n'
           PPI::Token::Whitespace             '\n'
           PPI::Statement::Expression
             PPI::Token::Bareword             'exit'
             PPI::Structure::List             ( ... )
             PPI::Token::Structure            ';'
           PPI::Token::Whitespace             '\n'

       Please note that in this this example, strings are only listed for the actual PPI::Token
       that contains that string. Structures are listed with the type of brace characters it
       represents noted.

       The PPI::Dumper module can be used to generate similar trees yourself.

       We can make that PDOM dump a little easier to read if we strip out all the whitespace.
       Here it is again, sans the distracting whitespace tokens.

         PPI::Document
           PPI::Token::Comment                '#!/usr/bin/perl\n'
           PPI::Statement::Expression
             PPI::Token::Bareword             'print'
             PPI::Structure::List             ( ... )
               PPI::Statement::Expression
                 PPI::Token::Quote::Double    '"Hello World!"'
             PPI::Token::Structure            ';'
           PPI::Statement::Expression
             PPI::Token::Bareword             'exit'
             PPI::Structure::List             ( ... )
             PPI::Token::Structure            ';'

       As you can see, the tree can get fairly deep at time, especially when every isolated token
       in a bracket becomes its own statement. This is needed to allow anything inside the tree
       the ability to grow. It also makes the search and analysis algorithms much more flexible.

       Because of the depth and complexity of PDOM trees, a vast number of very easy to use
       methods have been added wherever possible to help people working with PDOM trees do normal
       tasks relatively quickly and efficiently.

   Overview of the Primary Classes
       The main PPI classes, and links to their own documentation, are listed here in
       alphabetical order.

       PPI::Document
           The Document object, the root of the PDOM.

       PPI::Document::Fragment
           A cohesive fragment of a larger Document. Although not of any real current use, it is
           needed for use in certain internal tree manipulation algorithms.

           For example, doing things like cut/copy/paste etc. Very similar to a PPI::Document,
           but has some additional methods and does not represent a lexical scope boundary.

           A document fragment is also non-serializable, and so cannot be written out to a file.

       PPI::Dumper
           A simple class for dumping readable debugging versions of PDOM structures, such as in
           the demonstration above.

       PPI::Element
           The Element class is the abstract base class for all objects within the PDOM

       PPI::Find
           Implements an instantiable object form of a PDOM tree search.

       PPI::Lexer
           The PPI Lexer. Converts Token streams into PDOM trees.

       PPI::Node
           The Node object, the abstract base class for all PDOM objects that can contain other
           Elements, such as the Document, Statement and Structure objects.

       PPI::Statement
           The base class for all Perl statements. Generic "evaluate for side-effects" statements
           are of this actual type. Other more interesting statement types belong to one of its
           children.

           See it's own documentation for a longer description and list of all of the different
           statement types and sub-classes.

       PPI::Structure
           The abstract base class for all structures. A Structure is a language construct
           consisting of matching braces containing a set of other elements.

           See the PPI::Structure documentation for a description and list of all of the
           different structure types and sub-classes.

       PPI::Token
           A token is the basic unit of content. At its most basic, a Token is just a string
           tagged with metadata (its class, and some additional flags in some cases).

       PPI::Token::_QuoteEngine
           The PPI::Token::Quote and PPI::Token::QuoteLike classes provide abstract base classes
           for the many and varied types of quote and quote-like things in Perl. However, much of
           the actual quote login is implemented in a separate quote engine, based at
           PPI::Token::_QuoteEngine.

           Classes that inherit from PPI::Token::Quote, PPI::Token::QuoteLike and
           PPI::Token::Regexp are generally parsed only by the Quote Engine.

       PPI::Tokenizer
           The PPI Tokenizer. One Tokenizer consumes a chunk of text and provides access to a
           stream of PPI::Token objects.

           The Tokenizer is very very complicated, to the point where even the author treads
           carefully when working with it.

           Most of the complication is the result of optimizations which have tripled the
           tokenization speed, at the expense of maintainability. We cope with the spaghetti by
           heavily commenting everything.

       PPI::Transform
           The Perl Document Transformation API. Provides a standard interface and abstract base
           class for objects and classes that manipulate Documents.

INSTALLING

       The core PPI distribution is pure Perl and has been kept as tight as possible and with as
       few dependencies as possible.

       It should download and install normally on any platform from within the CPAN and CPANPLUS
       applications, or directly using the distribution tarball. If installing by hand, you may
       need to install a few small utility modules first. The exact ones will depend on your
       version of perl.

       There are no special install instructions for PPI, and the normal "Perl Makefile.PL",
       "make", "make test", "make install" instructions apply.

EXTENDING

       The PPI namespace itself is reserved for the sole use of the modules under the umbrella of
       the "Parse::Perl" SourceForge project.

       <http://sf.net/projects/parseperl>

       You are recommended to use the PPIx:: namespace for PPI-specific modifications or
       prototypes thereof, or Perl:: for modules which provide a general Perl language-related
       functions.

       If what you wish to implement looks like it fits into PPIx:: namespace, you should
       consider contacting the "Parse::Perl" mailing list (detailed on the SourceForge site)
       first, as what you want may already be in progress, or you may wish to consider joining
       the team and doing it within the "Parse::Perl" project itself.

TO DO

       - Many more analysis and utility methods for PDOM classes

       - Creation of a PPI::Tutorial document

       - Add many more key functions to PPI::XS

       - We can always write more and better unit tests

       - Complete the full implementation of ->literal (1.200)

       - Full understanding of scoping (due 1.300)

SUPPORT

       This module is stored in an Open Repository at the following address.

       <http://svn.ali.as/cpan/trunk/PPI>

       Write access to the repository is made available automatically to any published CPAN
       author, and to most other volunteers on request.

       If you are able to submit your bug report in the form of new (failing) unit tests, or can
       apply your fix directly instead of submitting a patch, you are strongly encouraged to do
       so, as the author currently maintains over 100 modules and it can take some time to deal
       with non-"Critical" bug reports or patches.

       This will also guarentee that your issue will be addressed in the next release of the
       module.

       For large changes though, please consider creating a branch so that they can be properly
       reviewed and trialed before being applied to the trunk.

       If you cannot provide a direct test or fix, or don't have time to do so, then regular bug
       reports are still accepted and appreciated via the CPAN bug tracker.

       <http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=PPI>

       For other issues or questions, contact the "Parse::Perl" project mailing list.

       For commercial or media-related enquiries, or to have your SVN commit bit enabled, contact
       the author.

AUTHOR

       Adam Kennedy <adamk@cpan.org>

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

       A huge thank you to Phase N Australia (<http://phase-n.com/>) for permitting the original
       open sourcing and release of this distribution from what was originally several thousand
       hours of commercial work.

       Another big thank you to The Perl Foundation (<http://www.perlfoundation.org/>) for
       funding for the final big refactoring and completion run.

       Also, to the various co-maintainers that have contributed both large and small with tests
       and patches and especially to those rare few who have deep-dived into the guts to (gasp)
       add a feature.

         - Dan Brook       : PPIx::XPath, Acme::PerlML
         - Audrey Tang     : "Line Noise" Testing
         - Arjen Laarhoven : Three-element ->location support
         - Elliot Shank    : Perl 5.10 support, five-element ->location

       And finally, thanks to those brave ( and foolish :) ) souls willing to dive in and use,
       test drive and provide feedback on PPI before version 1.000, in some cases before it made
       it to beta quality, and still did extremely distasteful things (like eating 50 meg of RAM
       a second).

       I owe you all a beer. Corner me somewhere and collect at your convenience.  If I missed
       someone who wasn't in my email history, thank you too :)

         # In approximate order of appearance
         - Claes Jacobsson
         - Michael Schwern
         - Jeff T. Parsons
         - CPAN Author "CHOCOLATEBOY"
         - Robert Rotherberg
         - CPAN Author "PODMASTER"
         - Richard Soderberg
         - Nadim ibn Hamouda el Khemir
         - Graciliano M. P.
         - Leon Brocard
         - Jody Belka
         - Curtis Ovid
         - Yuval Kogman
         - Michael Schilli
         - Slaven Rezic
         - Lars Thegler
         - Tony Stubblebine
         - Tatsuhiko Miyagawa
         - CPAN Author "CHROMATIC"
         - Matisse Enzer
         - Roy Fulbright
         - Dan Brook
         - Johnny Lee
         - Johan Lindstrom

       And to single one person out, thanks go to Randal Schwartz who spent a great number of
       hours in IRC over a critical 6 month period explaining why Perl is impossibly unparsable
       and constantly shoving evil and ugly corner cases in my face. He remained a tireless
       devil's advocate, and without his support this project genuinely could never have been
       completed.

       So for my schooling in the Deep Magiks, you have my deepest gratitude Randal.

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.