Just a Theory

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Posts about Sean Burke

Please Test Pod::Simple 3.29_3

Pod Book

I’ve just pushed Pod-Simple 3.29_v3 to CPAN. Karl Williamson did a lot of hacking on this release, finally adding support for EBCDIC. But as part of that work, and in coordination with Pod::Simple’s original author, Sean Burke, as well as pod-people, we have switched the default encoding from Latin-1 to CP-1252.

On the surface, that might sound like a big change, but in truth, it’s pretty straight-forward. CP-1252 is effectively a superset of Latin-1, repurposing 30 or so unused control characters from Latin-1. Those characters are pretty common on Windows (the home of the CP family of encodings), especially in pastes from Word. It’s nice to be able to pick those up essentially for free.

Still, Karl’s done more than that. He also updated the encoding detection to do a better job at detecting UTF-8. This is the real default. Pod::Simple only falls back on CP1252 if there are no obvious UTF-8 byte sequences in your Pod.

Overall these changes should be a great improvement. Better encoding support is always a good idea. But it is a pretty significant change, including a change to the Pod spec. Hence the test release. Please make sure it works well with your code by installing it today:

cpan D/DW/DWHEELER/Pod-Simple-3.29_3.tar.gz
cpanm DWHEELER/Pod-Simple-3.29_3.tar.gz

Oh, and one last thing: If Pod::Simple fails to properly recognize the encoding in your Pod file, you can always use the =encoding command early in your Pod file to make it explicit:

=encoding CP1254