The hardest part of getting my Japanese-novel-hacking scripts working on Windows was figuring out how to build the Text::MeCab Perl module. Strawberry Perl includes a complete development environment, but the supplied library file libmecab.lib simply didn’t work. I found some instructions on how to build MeCab from source with MinGW, but that was not a user-friendly install.

However, there were enough clues scattered around that I was able to figure out how to use the libmecab.DLL file that was hidden in another directory:

copy \Program Files\MeCab\sdk\mecab.h \strawberry\c\include
copy \Program Files\MeCab\bin\libmecab.dll \strawberry\perl\bin
cd \strawberry\perl\bin
pexports libmecab.dll > libmecab.def
dlltool -D libmecab.dll -l libmecab.a -d libmecab.def
move libmecab.a ..\..\c\lib
del libmecab.def
cpanm --interactive Text::MeCab

The interactive install is necessary because there’s no mecab-config shell script in the Windows distribution. The manual config is version: 0.996, compiler flags: -DWIN32, linker flags: -lmecab, encoding: utf-8.