POD::TEXT::TERMCAP(3pm)

hi bestie 💖 welcome to the Pod::Text::Termcap(3pm) page — yes, that’s the manual name, and we’re folding it in right here instead of doing a boring header line. This one’s all about making POD output look right in your terminal with the correct format escapes. Slay. 💅

✨ NAME ✨

Pod::Text::Termcap — convert POD data to ASCII text with format escapes 🎀

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

use Pod::Text::Termcap;
my $parser = Pod::Text::Termcap->new (sentence => 0, width => 78);

# Read POD from STDIN and write to STDOUT.
$parser->parse_from_filehandle;

# Read POD from file.pod and write to file.txt.
$parser->parse_from_file ('file.pod', 'file.txt');

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

Pod::Text::Termcap is a simple subclass of Pod::Text that highlights output text using the correct termcap escape sequences for the current terminal. Apart from the format codes, it in all ways functions like Pod::Text. See Pod::Text for details and available options. ✨

This module uses Term::Cap to find the correct terminal settings. See the documentation of that module for how it finds terminal database information and how to override that behavior if necessary. If it’s unable to find control strings for bold and underscore formatting, that formatting is skipped — no cap — resulting in the same output as Pod::Text. 🫶

🦋 COMPATIBILITY 🦋

Okay, history lesson, bestie — but make it cute. 💜

• Pod::Text::Termcap 0.04 (based on Pod::Parser) was the first version of this module included with Perl, in Perl 5.6.0.
• The current API based on Pod::Simple was added in Pod::Text::Termcap 2.00. Pod::Text::Termcap 2.01 was included in Perl 5.9.3, the first version of Perl to incorporate those changes.
• Pod::Text::Termcap 4.13 stopped setting the TERMPATH environment variable during module load. It also stopped falling back on VT100 escape sequences if Term::Cap was not able to find usable escape sequences, instead producing unformatted output for better results on dumb terminals. The next version to be incorporated into Perl, 4.14, was included in Perl 5.31.8. 🔥
• Several problems with wrapping and line length were fixed as recently as Pod::Text::Termcap 6.0.0.
• This module inherits its API and most behavior from Pod::Text, so the details in “COMPATIBILITY” in Pod::Text also apply. Pod::Text and Pod::Text::Termcap have had the same module version since 4.00, included in Perl 5.23.7. (They unfortunately diverge in confusing ways prior to that.) 😭

💀 CAVEATS 💀

Line wrapping is done only at ASCII spaces and tabs, rather than using a correct Unicode-aware line wrapping algorithm. That’s the caveat tea. 🍓

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Russ Allbery <rra@cpan.org> 👑

🎀 COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE 🎀

Copyright 1999, 2001-2002, 2004, 2006, 2008-2009, 2014-2015, 2018-2019, 2022, 2024 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 🌈

Pod::Text, Pod::Simple, Term::Cap

The current version of this module 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. 🦋

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okay, that’s the whole manual, bestie 💖 — footer check: perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-11-03, and the manual name is Pod::Text::Termcap(3pm). byeee 🫶✨