Perl::Critic::Policy::Documentation::RequireLinkedURLs3pm

Use l<> markup on urls in pod

Overview

This policy is part of the "Perl::Critic::Pulp" add-on. It asks you to put "L<>" markup on URLs in POD text in Perl 5.8 and higher.

    use 5.008;
    =head1 HOME PAGE
    http://foo.org/mystuff/index.html      # bad

    L<http://foo.org/mystuff/index.html>   # good

"L<>" markup gives clickable links in "pod2html" and similar formatters, and even in the plain text formatters may give "<http://...>" style angles around the URL which is a semi-conventional way to delimit from surrounding text and in particular from an immediately following comma or period.

This is only cosmetic and on that basis this policy is low severity and under the "cosmetic" theme (see "POLICY THEMES" in Perl::Critic).

Only plain text parts of the POD are considered. Verbatim paragraphs cannot have "L<>" markup (and it's usually a mistake to put it there, as per "ProhibitVerbatimMarkup").

    This is verbatim text,
        http://somewhere.com      # ok in verbatim

Perl 5.8

"L<http://...>" linking of URLs is new in the Perl 5.8 POD specification. It comes out badly from the formatters in earlier Perl where the "/" is taken to be a section delimiter. For that reason this policy only applies if there's an explicit "use 5.008" or higher in the code.

    use 5.005;

    =item C<http://foo.org>       # ok when don't have Perl 5.8 L<>

Bad URLs

Some obvious intentional dummy URLs like "L<http://example.com>" are ignored. They're examples and won't go anywhere as a clickable link. You might like to put "C<>" on them for a typeface, but that is not required by this policy. Currently ignored URL variations are like

    http://example.com
    http://foo.com
    https://foo.org
    ftp://bar.org.au
    http://quux.com.au
    http://xyzzy.co.uk
    http://foo.co.nz
    http://host:port
    http://...

A URL is anything starting "http://", "https://", "ftp://", "news://" or "nntp://".

Begin Blocks

Text in any "=begin :foo" block is checked since ":" means POD markup and it's likely URLs can be helpfully linked there, even if it's only for some particular formatter.

Other "=begin" blocks are ignored since "L<>" there will not normally be possible or desirable.

Disabling

If you don't care about this, if for instance it's hard enough to get your programmers to write documentation at all without worrying about markup, then disable "RequireLinkedURLs" from your ~/.perlcriticrc file in the usual way (see "CONFIGURATION" in Perl::Critic),

    [-Documentation::RequireLinkedURLs]

Home page

<http://user42.tuxfamily.org/perl-critic-pulp/index.html>

Releases

4 releases since Debian 10 (Buster); the text changed 1 time.

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