NAME

Perl::Analysis::Static - analyse your Perl documents (without running them)

VERSION

version 0.004

DESCRIPTION

Perl::Analysis::Static extracts information from your Perl sources. It's a toolbox for developers to take a look at their code. It examines the code without running it.

Perl is notoriously hard to parse because of its flexible syntax. Thus, programs (and sometimes humans) have a hard time telling where variables are declared, subroutines are called and if they are used at all. The tools in this distribution hope to give humans and programs the means to get answers for questions about perl code.

Humans may use the perlanalyst on the command line whilst machines ought to use the API provided by Perl::Analysis::Static::Question and friends.

Here are some basic examples to help get you started.

  # find all subroutine declarations, recursively process all Perl
  # files beneath directory
  perlanalyst --all Sub
  
  # the same, but show only the declaration of the subroutine "foo"
  perlanalyst --all Sub --filter Name=foo

  # the same, but asked as a question
  perlanalyst --question Sub::Name=foo
  
  # the same, but look in another directory
  perlanalyst -q Sub::Name=foo ~/perl5/lib/perl5/Test

  # list questions you may ask
  perlanalyst --list-questions
  
  # list analyses
  perlanalyst --list-analyses
  
  # list filters
  perlanalyst --list-filters

  # see a list of the files that would be examined
  perlanalyst --list-files

INSTALLATION

Please refer to the file INSTALL for documentation of the installation process.

WARNING

This is alpha software. This means that everything may change any time. Programs, modules and variables might be renamed, APIs may be created or deleted, command line arguments may vanish.

A WORD ABOUT WORDS

The wonderful PPI, which we use for parsing sources, introduced the concept of a Perl document. We'll stick with that terminology.

SEE ALSO

PPI is used for parsing the Perl documents.

Perl::Critic is a different kind of tool. It has the knowledge of experienced perl programmers built in and tells you if your code smells.

AUTHOR

Gregor Goldbach <glauschwuffel@nomaden.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2011 by Gregor Goldbach.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.