perlquestion
mertserger
<p>As I have posted before, I have to maintain a script written XML::Twig to validate dictionary entries. In one part of the entry we can have <la> elements which are used to hold label information such as whether the word is rare or not. The test for rare is that the la element contains the text "rare".</p>
<p>I have now been asked to modify this so that the word is not treated as rare when the la element is marked with an attribute fq with a vlaue of 0 or 1. The fq attribute can also have a value of 2 in which case the word is still to be treated as rare.</p>
<p>My code so far looks like this:
<code>sub is_la_rare {
my $elt = shift; # can be <labels> or <def>
foreach my $label ($elt->children('la') ) {
next unless $label->text eq "rare";
my $isNowRare = 0;
if (
($label->att('fq') eq "0")
|| ($label->att('fq') eq "1")
)
{ $isNowRare = 1; }
if ( !$isNowRare ) { return 1; }
}
return 0;
}
</code></p>
<p>The problem is that this generates "Use of uninitialized value in string eq" which I think is caused by the cases when the la element does not have an fq attribute on it. So I want to add a test for the attribute like this:
<code>($label ->att('fq') && $label->att('fq') == "1")</code>. The first bit returns the value of the attribute so it works when that is 1 but if I try to use where the attribute is "0" <code>($label ->att('fq') && $label->att('fq') == "0")</code> it doesn't work because it then returns 0 for the first bit.</p>
<p>Is there a way of testing for the presence of an attribute in XML::Twig which would return "1" if the attribute is present regardless of the value of the attribute?</p>