NAME

WWW::LEO - Perl interface to the English-German online dictionary at http://dict.leo.org

SYNOPSIS

  use WWW::LEO;
  use Data::Dumper;

  my $leo = WWW::LEO->new;
  $leo->query("@ARGV");
  if ($leo->num_results) {
    my $i;
    foreach my $resultpair (@{$leo->en_de}) {
      printf "%3d: %-40s %s\n", ++$i, @$resultpair;
    }
  } else {
    print "Sorry, your query for '%s'gave no results.\n", $leo->query;
  }

DESCRIPTION

This module provides an interface to the English-German online dictionary located at http://dict.leo.org.

METHODS

new

This constructs a new WWW::LEO object. You can pass a hashref with configuration info to the constructor. Currently recognized key words are:

agent

sets the user agent string that is used to identify the module

query

If a scalar is supplied, queries the dictionary for the string contained within. Returns the number of results.

If no argument is given, returns the query string of the last query. Returns undef if no query has been made yet with this object.

reset

Resets the WWW::LEO object to the state as if no query had been made. Returns the resetted WWW::LEO object.

This method shouldn't be used in normal cases. It's there to provide the possibility of explicitely cleaning up the WWW::LEO object.

agent

Returns the LWP::UserAgent object that WWW::LEO uses to query the dictionary.

request

Returns the HTTP::Request object that WWW::LEO passes to LWP::UserAgent when quering the dictionary.

response

Returns the HTTP::Response object that results from the query to the dictionary.

num_results

Returns the number of results of the last query.

Returns undef if no query has been made.

maxlen_de

This is a convenience method: returns the longest string in of the English results.

Returns undef if no query has been made.

maxlen_en

This is a convenience method: returns the longest string of the German results.

Returns undef if no query has been made.

en_de

Returns a reference to an array whose elements are references to arrays containing the English and German result pairs in elements 0 and 1, respectively.

en

Convenience method: Returns an array reference containing the English results.

de

Convenience method: Returns an array reference containing the English results.

EXPORT

None, as this is an object-oriented module.

SEE ALSO

• the http://dict.leo.org homepage

• the sample clients included with this package:

  eg/simpleclient.pl

  for a simple example

  eg/leo.pl

  for a fully-fledged program

• LEO clients written in Perl (not using this module):

  • ftp://ftp.daemon.de/scip/Scripts/leo

  • http://cgi.xwolf.de/perl/leo.txt

  • http://scripts.irssi.de/html/leodict.pl.html (this is a plugin script for the irssi IRC client, see http://www.irssi.org)

KNOWN BUGS AND OTHER ISSUES

• The parsing scheme used to extract the results could probably be improved to be more robust.

TODO

• implement more robust parsing scheme

• provide more flexibility for the user (constructor options, ...)

• implement support for headlines ("Direct Matches (+ Prepositions)", "Composed Entries", ...) and other LEO options (see the web page)

  Also see the TODO file contained in the module distribution.

SUPPORT

Please contact the current maintainer of this module to report any bugs or suggest changes to this module:

Jörg Ziefle <ziefle@cpan.org>

AUTHOR

Jörg Ziefle <ziefle@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2002 by Jörg Ziefle

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