PDFlib Text Extraction Toolkit (TET) Manual

3.7 Perl Binding
Installing the TET Edition for Perl. TET is implemented as a C library which can dynamically
be attached to Perl. This requires Perl to be built with support for loading extensions
at runtime. The name of the TET Perl extension is tetlib_pl.
Installing the TET Edition for Perl. The Perl extension mechanism loads shared libraries
at runtime through the DynaLoader module. The Perl executable must have been
compiled with support for shared libraries (this is true for the majority of Perl configurations).
For the TET binding to work, the Perl interpreter must access the TET Perl wrapper
and the module file tetlib_pl.pm. In addition to the platform-specific methods described
below you can add a directory to Perl’s @INC module search path using the -I command
line option:
perl -I/path/to/tet extractor.pl
Unix. Perl will search both tetlib_pl.so (on Mac OS X: tetlib_pl.dylib) and tetlib_pl.pm in
the current directory, or the directory printed by the following Perl command:
perl -e 'use Config; print $Config{sitearchexp};'
Perl will also search the subdirectory auto/tetlib_pl. Typical output of the above command
looks like
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8/i686-linux
Windows. PDFlib supports the ActiveState port of Perl 5 to Windows, also known as
ActivePerl. Both tetlib_pl.dll and tetlib_pl.pm will be searched in the current directory, or
the directory printed by the following Perl command:
perl -e "use Config; print $Config{sitearchexp};"
Typical output of the above command looks like
C:\Program Files\Perl5.8\site\lib
Exception Handling in Perl. When a TET exception occurs, a Perl exception is thrown. It
can be caught and acted upon using an eval sequence:
eval {
...some TET instructions...
};
die "Exception caught: $@" if $@;
28 Chapter 3: TET Library Language Bindings