WWW(3)							     Library Functions Manual							    WWW(3)

NAME

       WWW - World Wide Web Package

SYNOPSIS

       extract_description( FILE )
       extract_meta( FILE, NAME )
       hyperlink( LIST )

DESCRIPTION

       This  package  provides a utility functions for the World Wide Web to extract descriptions of or meta information from files, and hyperlink
       text.

SUBROUTINES

       The following Perl subroutines are defined and available:

       extract_description( FILE )
	      Extracts a description from an HTML or plain text file given by the FILE name; FILE should be an absolute path.  The first $descrip-
	      tion::chars  (default:  2048) characters are read.  If the file ends in one of the extensions htm, html, or shtml, it is presumed to
	      be an HTML file; if the file ends in txt, it is presumed to be a plain text file.   Other  extensions  are  not  recognized  and	no
	      description is returned for them.

	      For  HTML  files,  first, if a <META NAME="description" CONTENT="..."> or a <META NAME="DC.description" CONTENT="..."> (Dublin Core)
	      element is found, then the words specified as the value of the CONTENT attribute is returned as the description.

	      Otherwise, all HTML comments, text between <SCRIPT>, <STYLE>, and <TITLE> tags, and all other HTML tags are stripped.  If <AREA  ...
	      ALT="..."> or <IMG ... ALT="..."> elements are found, then the words specified as the value of the ALT attributes are extracted.

	      Finally, for either HTML or plain text files, at most $description::words (default: 50) are returned.

       extract_meta( FILE, NAME )
	      Extracts	the value of the CONTENT attribute from a META element having the given NAME attribute from an HTML file given by the FILE
	      name; FILE should be an absolute path.  The file must end in one of the extensions htm, html, or shtml  to  be  considered  an  HTML
	      file.  The first $description::chars (default: 2048) characters are read.  The characters are cached between consecutive calls using
	      the same filename.

       hyperlink( LIST )
	      Adds hyperlinks to strings: that is strings that contain substrings that are valid URLs (according to RFC 1630) have the appropriate
	      HTML  tags  ``wrapped''  around  them  so  that  they will be selectable when displayed in a browser.  The ftp, gopher, http, https,
	      mailto, news, telnet, and wais URLs are recognized.  Example:

		 Read all about it at
		 http://www.usatoday.com/

	    becomes:

		 Read all about it at
		 <A HREF="http://www.usatoday.com/">http://www.usatoday.com/</A>

SEE ALSO

       perl(1)

       Tim Berners-Lee.  ``Universal Resource Identifiers in WWW,'' Request for Comments 1630, Network Working Group of the  Internet  Engineering
       Task Force, June 1994.

       Tim Berners-Lee, Larry Masinter, and Mark McCahill.  ``Uniform Resource Locators (URL),'' Request for Comments 1738, Network Working Group,
       1994.

       Dave Raggett, Arnaud Le Hors, and Ian Jacobs.  ``Notes on helping search engines index your Web site,'' HTML 4.0 Specification, Appendix B:
       Performance, Implementation, and Design Notes, World Wide Web Consortium, April 1998.

       --.  ``Objects, Images, and Applets: How to specify alternate text,'' HTML 4.0 Specification, S13.8, World Wide Web Consortium, April 1998.

       Dublin Core Directorate.  ``The Dublin Core: A Simple Content Description Model for Electronic Resources.''

       Larry Wall, et al.  Programming Perl, 3rd ed., O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., Sebastopol, CA, 2000.

AUTHOR

       Paul J. Lucas <pauljlucas@mac.com>

WWW
								 February 12, 2000							    WWW(3)