From time to time, I look back and take tally of what programs and modules I released in the past. This is one of these posts.

Text::HTML::Turndown - turn HTML into Markdown

This module is a clone of the Mixmark turndown library, which converts HTML into Markdown.

my $markdown = html2markdown('<h1>Hello World</h1>');
# Hello World

The module is highly convenient for my note-taking tool, which lets me edit notes as contentEditable HTML to enable formatting and pasting of images etc. . Other times, I want to do quick text editing, and using Markdown is far more convenient than editing HTML on my mobile phone. As I store the documents not as HTML but Markdown, converting from HTML/contentEditable to Markdown is helpful here.

The nice thing about this module is that I chose to reuse the test suite of the turndown Javascript library and styled the code similarly to the Javascript example. That made porting some changes in the Javascript library to Perl very easy, even if I don't strive for 1:1 identity.

Date::Find - extract dates from filenames

Together with the app move-year, this is a nifty tool to watch my download directory and move bank statement .pdf files into the corresponding directories organized by year. Often these files are named in weird ways like statement-03.01.2025.pdf or accountstatement-2025-january.pdf, but I want them in a directory bankstatements/2025/ . Date::Find looks at the filenames and finds the year (and month, and day). The app then creates the appropriate year (or month, or day) directory and moves the file there.

Mojo::UserAgent::Paranoid - paranoid user agent for Mojolicious

As my note-taking tool fetches link previews, I want to be a bit more cautious as to what URLs I freely fetch. This adapts Net::DNS::Paranoid and the ruleset to also work for Mojolicious.

What I did not release

That link preview/card generation thing - postponed

• Mojolicious::Plugin::UrlWithout

A small HTML page helper that returns an URL without a given key/value combination:

    my $url = "/filter?label=foo&label=bar";
    my $other = url_without( "/filter", label => 'foo' );
   # /filter?label=bar

This module sounded like a really good idea, so I wrote it. The use case was a search/filter page, where you can toggle different labels by clicking on them. The labels were realized as <a href=... elements. Then I realized I don't need it at all, if I switch my HTML to a form with GET and use HTMX to automatically update the filter:

<form method="GET" action="/filter" hx-get="/filter" hx-trigger="change from:input changed">
<label for="label-foo">foo</label><input type="checkbox" checked name="label" value="foo" />
<label for="label-bar">bar</label><input type="checkbox" checked name="label" value="bar" />
<button type="submit" class="nojs">Apply</button>
</form>

Patches I contributed

I contributed a small change to the DBD::SQLite catalog functions so it now also knows about generated columns in a table. Funnily, the old SQLite function was named table_info, and the function including the generated columns is named table_xinfo . I guess once there is another type of information to return, they will need to add table_yinfo, or move to the Microsoft-stlyle of having table_info_ex(), with another parameter listing the information actually wanted by the caller.

Patches that were not applied (yet)

Together with Mojo::UserAgent::Paranoid, I also added IPv6 support to Net::DNS::Paranoid, but my changes have not yet been reviewed or accepted.

I use that patched module locally, and there it works well.