Question

Let’s say I have this dummy Perl package in test.pm:

package test;

use strict;
use warnings;

=head1 DESCRIPTION

=head2 env

Return the environment name.

=cut

sub env { return "environment name"; }

=head2 hst

Return the history file name.

=cut

sub hst { return "history file"; }

=head2 hst_dir

Return the directory containing the history file.

=cut

sub hst_dir { return "history directory"; }

1;

Then, I run a spell check from command line using Test::Spelling…

$ perl -MTest::More -MTest::Spelling \
> -e 'pod_file_spelling_ok("test.pm", "spell check"); done_testing;'

…, and my function names env and hst are marked as a typos, but hst_dir is accepted:

not ok 1 - spell check
#   Failed test 'spell check'
#   at -e line 1.
# Errors:
#     env
#     hst
1..1
# Looks like you failed 1 test of 1.

I know I can list a custom dictionary with add_stopwords(), but in my opinion function names should not be spell-checked at all.

Did I miss some fine-print in the documentation?

Answer 1

You’re spell-cheking your POD, not your code.

Test::Spelling sees:

=head2 env
=head2 hst

How would it know that that are function names (not that it knows the concept of function names at all)?

It does see hst_dir as a perlish keyword, due to the underscore, whixh is not a normal character in a word. But that’s as best it gets without stop words…