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 - 2010 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.