How to parse cpanfile?

If all you want to do is process data from your own cpanfile then a useful simple option might be to just do or require it. All you need to do is define a few subs like requires and recommends first, which will be called a bunch of times by the cpanfile and given the dependency data. So the subs should collect it somewhere, and then you can do something with it afterwards.

If you do this you are running the cpanfile as code so you need to be able to trust it, obviously.

And you don’t want to use this as a general parsing approach because the full set of subs you need to define (all the configure_requires, configure_recommends, build_requires, build_recommends, etc variations) is probably excessive.

But if all you are doing is processing your own cpanfile then trust is not an issue and you almost certainly only use a few of the keywords, so this is a nice option.

You could add perl after the triple back-tick to have color highlighting:

use Module::CPANfile;

my $file = Module::CPANfile->load("cpanfile");
my $prereqs = $file->prereqs; # CPAN::Meta::Prereqs object

my @features = $file->features; # CPAN::Meta::Feature objects
my $merged_prereqs = $file->prereqs_with(@identifiers); # CPAN::Meta::Prereqs

$file->merge_meta('MYMETA.json');