The Net::DNS::Zone::Parser should be considered a preprocessor that "normalizes" a zonefile. It will read a zonefile in a format conforming to the relevant RFCs with the addition of BIND's GENERATE directive from disk and will write fully specified resource records (RRs) to a filehandle. Whereby: - All comments are stripped - There is one RR per line - Each RR is fully expanded i.e. all domain names are fully qualified (canonicalised) and the CLASS and TTLs are specified. - Some RRs may be 'stripped' from the source or otherwise processed. For details see the 'read' method. Note that this module does not have a notion of what constitutes a valid zone, it only parses. For example, the parser will happilly parse RRs with ownernames that are below in another zone because a NS RR elsewhere in the zone.