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Lingua-EN-Numericalize (1.52)

The module works correctly to do its job. It also includes some very odd numbers, like eleventy-one. Unfortunately it contains the British billion, and the bugs listed in the documentation still haven't been fixed (five years later!) but basically it's a sound module.

BKB - 2008-06-24 05:18:47
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CGI.pm (3.37)

This module is totally unuseable. The documentation makes no sense. It has ludicrous bugs regarding encodings. It is virtually impossible to correctly position CSS and JavaScript in your web page if you use this, and generally speaking CGI.pm is inflexible, badly documented and a nasty piece of junk which seems designed only to make life miserable for CGI programmers.

After more than ten years of the WWW, why can't Perl come up with something better than CGI.pm?

And PS - ignore these who tell you my review isn't useful. This review is the most useful review of CGI.pm you'll ever see. Be glad you read this before CGI.pm had a chance to kick yet another user in the nuts.

*Don't use this module.*

BKB - 2008-06-23 06:14:11
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HTML-TableExtract (2.10)

Useful, but has flaws.

This module is very handy for getting the entries out of tables quickly. However it has some flaws. For example it's not possible to get the attributes of the <td> and other tags which form the table, so if you need to extract only the elements which have a certain name or class, you'll be stuck with this.

There is a way around the problem but it's complicated.

The other big problem with this module is that it's broken on Cygwin and Windows.

BKB - 2008-06-23 05:45:17
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Text-Levenshtein (0.05)

This module doesn't handle utf8 strings correctly & it's extremely buggy. Unuseable as it stands.

BKB - 2008-06-14 18:12:33
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Text-LevenshteinXS (0.03)

This module doesn't handle UTF-8 encoded strings correctly. It only works on ASCII.

BKB - 2008-06-12 06:43:35
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String-Approx (3.26)

This module seems to work to some extent, but it has a fair share of problems. First of all, it doesn't seem to work with Perl's utf8, so lengths from "aindex" and "aslice" come out in bytes even when it's fed a correctly encoded UTF-8 string. Secondly, the calling conventions for these routines are counterintuitive The routine "aslice" refuses to return a list in list context. Instead, if it's called in list context, it returns a reference to an array, and if it's called in scalar context, it returns a list, which is then converted to a number because of the scalar context. I don't know what the author could possibly have been thinking when he designed that.

Be warned also about version 2.7 of this module. cpanratings doesn't seem to allow me to add different comments for two versions of the same module, so I'll put comments here. The code is dangerous - it calls "die" if there is an input error instead of just returning to the calling routine. Also the source code is almost unreadable, the variable names are one or two letters long. It works with UTF-8 because it only uses regular expressions, but it's an utter mess. I can't recommend either version 3.26 or version 2.7.

Note to other reviewer:

The problem is not with a program "die"ing on error - the problem is with a module "die"ing on error. If I use the module without reading the source code, then for some reason my input is munged, my program will die because of a die in a module which I didn't know about. If my program is a server or something, that is extremely bad. I have reported that as a bug. Thanks for reminding me.

BKB - 2008-06-12 05:09:22
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ShiftJIS-CP932-Correct (0.05)

I found this module when I was processing a bunch of Microsoft Word files and getting errors of the form "shiftjis \x87 does not map to unicode". I quickly installed this module, put it into my program, ran the program again, and got rid of the errors, in a couple of minutes. Great. Thanks!

BKB - 2008-05-28 21:35:38
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Lingua-JA-Numbers (0.04)

The module works well & is clearly documented. It has a lot of power in being able to convert numbers in either kanji or kana, and not overflowing with big numbers.

BKB - 2008-05-18 18:53:08
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Smart-Comments (v1.0.3)

A very handy way to add debugging to a program without having to use lots of print statements.

BKB - 2008-05-10 18:36:17
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Business-ISBN (2.03)

It does what it says it does - what more could you want? Nice module with no fuss and no mess, has been very useful to me.

BKB - 2008-05-08 22:47:23
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WWW-Search-ISBNDB (0.3)

First of all, the documentation of this module is difficult. The example doesn't work, it has ' in the wrong places, the "native_query" method used for searching isn't documented, and when you do get it to run it just prints out HASH(0x10239485) type of things.

Secondly, it doesn't seem to work properly - the results I got were nonsense, and I couldn't see what I was supposed to do from the documentation. I wanted to search by ISBN but it didn't make it clear how to do that.

In the end it was much easier to write the scraper "by hand" using LWP::Simple and the excellent API documentation of ISBNdb.com than using this module, so my advice is to forget it.

BKB - 2008-05-08 22:45:55
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WWW-Scraper-ISBN (0.25)

Don't bother with this - it needs the drivers but most of them don't work any more. I needed to scrape some ISBNs so I tried this out, but I ended up writing a simple scraper "by hand" (i.e. get the page with LWP::Simple, then chop it up to get the data) without using this module.

The problem is that as the web page formats change with time, if nobody updates the drivers for each ISBN data site, then they can't be used any more. At the moment nobody seems to have maintained most of the drivers for three or four years, so best not to use this thing unless someone starts maintaining the drivers again.

BKB - 2008-05-08 06:21:15
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WWW-Scraper-ISBN-ISBNdb_Driver (0.04)

Seems to work to some extent, but has enormous list of dependencies.

Crashed on ISBN 0440214041.

BKB - 2008-05-08 05:26:54
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WWW-Scraper-ISBN-Pearson_Driver (0.09)

This module doesn't seem to function at all any more. It returned failure on every one of 27 ISBNs I tried.

BKB - 2008-05-08 04:57:01
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WWW-Scraper-ISBN-LOC_Driver (0.22)

This module doesn't seem to work at all. Without investigating the internals, it completely failed to get any results on 27 common ISBNs (John Grisham novels etc.) so it's a fair bet that this is no longer functional.

BKB - 2008-05-08 04:55:11
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DateTime-Calendar-Japanese (0.06001)

This module seems incredibly bloated, requiring huge numbers of other modules and libraries to be downloaded and installed. I can't see what it needs so many other modules for - why not recode it in a simpler way?

BKB - 2007-09-11 01:04:41
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Lingua-EN-Numbers (1.01)

Nice, useful utility. No problems or bugs that I have noticed.

BKB - 2007-09-10 08:29:14
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