http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=787610


in reply to A data structure for XML generation

If you've defined two explicit cases for $inner (scalar or array ref), you can always differentiate it from a hash ref, so why not just make the \%attr optional and just omit the empty hashes {}? 

[ family => { name => 'Kawasaki' },
  [
    [father => 'Yasushisa' ],
    [mother => 'Chizuko' ],
    [children =>
      [
        [girl => 'Shiori'],
        [boy  => 'Yasuke'],
        [boy  => 'Kairi']
      ]
    ]
  ]
]

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I also think your example had a couple minor errors (extra array ref and no punctuation between 'children' and its children.)

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Re^2: A data structure for XML generation
by metaperl (Curate) on Aug 11, 2009 at 14:16 UTC
    If you've defined two explicit cases for $inner (scalar or array ref), you can always differentiate it from a hash ref, so why not just make the \%attr optional and just omit the empty hashes {}?
    Yes, I certainly thought of that. And you will often simply provide content without attributes, so I think that is a nice shorthand.
[reply]
      You may use something like the lol structure of the method new_from_lol in HTML::Element, I think it is very compact and easy to handle.
[reply]

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