Jason Filley – SnakeLegs

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then a picture of a thousand words is worth a million words. And you can quote me on that.

GraphViz is handy graph visualization software. Go to the GraphViz website and check out their Gallery, at least.

When coupled with Perl, GraphViz becomes truly spectacular. Leon Brocard’s GraphViz Perl module just might save you a lot of time. One thing I needed modified on it, however, was the handling of node names. If you wanted a node named “bob@example.com” the module would produce a generic node name of “node141″, which was restrictive for the two things I primarily use the module for (email addresses, and DNS mapping).

What follows is a quick diff to allow one to use arbitrary node and cluster names. They’re just straightforward regexes. They work for everything I use them for, and I haven’t had them bomb out. I think the reserved words (e.g., “graph”) need expanded, as well, but this will work for now.

graphviz_quoted_names.diff.txt