Perl::Critic::Policy::Documentation::RequireLinkedURLs - use L<> markup on URLs in POD

Copyright

       Copyright 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2021 Kevin Ryde

       Perl-Critic-Pulp is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU
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perl v5.32.1                                       2021-02-28             Perl::Critic::P...quireLinkedURLs(3pm)

Description

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

Perl5.8
"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<>

BadURLs
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.comhttp://foo.com
https://foo.org
ftp://bar.org.auhttp://quux.com.auhttp://xyzzy.co.ukhttp://foo.co.nzhttp://host:port
http://...

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

BeginBlocks
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

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Name

       Perl::Critic::Policy::Documentation::RequireLinkedURLs - use L<> markup on URLs in POD