Produce POD from a Pod::Simple::SimpleTree tree

[book]

Pod::Simple::SimpleTree returns a tree-like data structure. I'm trying to use one of those for manipulating POD, and reorganizing a POD document programmatically.

I couldn't find code in Pod-Simple for turning the tree back into POD, so I wrote my own.

Right now, it's a simple as_pod function that takes the array ref returned by the root method and returns the POD as a string. It took less than 50 lines of code.

Would such functionality be useful to share as part of Pod-Simple?

My main issue is I don't know where to put it. I'm thinking as a method of the parser:

my $parser = Pod::Simple::SimpleTree->new;
my $tree = $parser->parse_file( $file )->root;
say $parser->as_pod( $tree ); # maybe use $self->root as the default?

Is it worth sending a patch? What's the minimum Perl version I should try to support?

[khwilliamson]

It's fine with me to send a patch. I suggest first seeing in what version it becomes harder to implement, and then shooting for that.

[book]

in what version it becomes harder to implement

Do you mean "version of Perl"? The code is extremely simple and can likely go back as far as Pod-Simple itself goes.

What I like about this is that it should be extremely simple to test: just grab random POD files and test that they round trip.

[khwilliamson]

I meant version of Perl. I think you answered your own question, if this works on any Pod-Simple version, there's nothing to think about.