Relating data parsed with XMLSimple

[mohan2monks]

Dear Monks, I am working on a old code which uses XMLSimple to parse XML data.
I have a data set in which i need to relate the tags by occurance like Phone tag if followed by preceding Name tag then it is related to it.
I can't do this with XMLSimple as the data structure it returns creates the keys of Name tag and Phone tag thereby grouping the data related to them.
Please see this example

use XML::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;
my $data=qq(<Data><Name><Lname>xyz</Lname><Fname>abcd</Fname></Name><P
+hone><Mobile>123456789</Mobile><Home>55656556</Home></Phone><Phone><M
+obile>123456789</Mobile><Home>55656556</Home></Phone><Name><Lname>UTV
+</Lname><Fname>EFGH</Fname></Name><Phone><Mobile>123456789</Mobile><H
+ome>55656556</Home></Phone></Data>);

my $ref=XMLin($data);

print Dumper($ref);

which shows output
$VAR1 = {
          'Phone' => [
                     {
                       'Home' => '55656556',
                       'Mobile' => '123456789'
                     },
                     {
                       'Home' => '55656556',
                       'Mobile' => '123456789'
                     },
                     {
                       'Home' => '55656556',
                       'Mobile' => '123456789'
                     }
                   ],
          'Name' => [
                    {
                      'Lname' => 'xyz',
                      'Fname' => 'abcd'
                    },
                    {
                      'Lname' => 'UTV',
                      'Fname' => 'EFGH'
                    }
                  ]
        };

From this i can't make out which phone number is associated with which name, Please help.

Out of sheer desperation may be i can use this

#on above $data i can split up the above string with each
#Name tag followed by Phone tags associated with this
my @namephn=map{m/<Name>.*?<\/Phone>/g } $data;
print join "\n",@namephn; 
#---------- Output -------------
<Name><Lname>xyz</Lname><Fname>abcd</Fname></Name><Phone><Mobile>12345
+6789</Mobile><Home>55656556</Home></Phone>
<Name><Lname>UTV</Lname><Fname>EFGH</Fname></Name><Phone><Mobile>12345
+6789</Mobile><Home>55656556</Home></Phone>

But how do i make that lazy ? operator match more than one phone tag till the next Name tag :-(

[Jenda]

The XML is not very well designed ... depending on the order of tags in a data oriented XML is a bad idea. Anyway ... do you like this output better?:

use strict;
use XML::Rules;
use Data::Dumper;
my $data=q(
<Data>
<Name><Lname>xyz</Lname><Fname>abcd</Fname></Name>
<Phone><Mobile>123456789</Mobile><Home>55656556</Home></Phone>
<Phone><Mobile>123456789</Mobile><Home>55656556</Home></Phone>
<Name><Lname>UTV</Lname><Fname>EFGH</Fname></Name>
<Phone><Mobile>123456789</Mobile><Home>55656556</Home></Phone>
</Data>);

my $parser = XML::Rules->new(
    stripspaces => 7,
    rules => {
        _default => 'content',
        Name => 'as array no content',
        Phone => sub { #return;
            my ($tag,$attr,$context,$parents) = @_;
            if (! $parents->[-1]{Name}) {
                warn "<Phone> before <Name>!\n";
            } else {
                push @{$parents->[-1]{Name}[-1]{Phones}}, $attr;
            }
            return
        },
        Data => sub {$_[1]->{Name}},
    }
);

my $ref = $parser->parse($data);
print Dumper($ref);

[mohan2monks]

Yes sir this output definately looks better but will have to install this module and check if this is possible to include in the existing code.

Thank you very much

[Anonymous Monk]

Your XML does not associate names with numbers, not at all

[mohan2monks]

It is supposed to be like this in XML

Name    Mark

Phone    1234

Phone     7895

Name     Glenn

Phone     6789

Then the two tags followed immediately after first Name tag are related to it e.g. Mark's numbers are 1234,7895 and Glenn's will be 6789. The xml i receive is from a third party web service.

[Anonymous Monk]

The xml i receive is from a third party web service.

File a bug report immediately, as their format is stupid.

[rovf]

Your way of defining the XML structure seems to be questionable to me. As it was already pointed out, you don't have a name-number association in your code. Maybe you can trick XML::Simple into returning something you will like better, by passing the option

forcearray => [ 'Data' ]

to XMLin(), but if you have the chance to influence the design of this piece of XML, I suggest that you redesign it.

[mohan2monks]

This typ of data is received by Web service call with SOAP Lite.

However i cannot even change the module to parse XML as this is old code which was already working and need to fix it.

From CPAN i found that may be XML::Twig can be used to sort this out.

[Jenda]

I do not think there is any mix of options that would convince XML::Simple to preserve the "relation" between Names and Phones.