More with XML Parser

[orthanc]

Hi Again

As you guys were so much help with my last XML problem I have another I need help with.

Take this xml below, using XML::Parser I can gain access to the data between
the inside tags.

I need to be able to access the data stored in name,
as it is an attribute of the inside tag I can't figure out how to access it

Is there an option for XML::Parser to make it expand this kind of tag?

Example XML:

	<outside>
		<inside name="Wibble">some data</inside>
	</outside>

Thanks in advance, i'm sure someone will know the answer :)

[btrott]

What handlers are you using w/ XML::Parser? Or are you using one of the Styles? Ie. Tree style?

If you're using a handler, you can get the data in "name" in your StartTag handler. The attributes are arguments to the handler, like this:

my $data = <<STOP;
<outside>
  <inside name="Wibble">some data</inside>
</outside>
STOP

my $parser = new XML::Parser(Handlers => {
    Start => \&start_tag
});

$parser->parse($data);

sub start_tag {
    my $expat = shift;
    my $element = shift;
    my %attrs = @_;

    print $attrs{name};
}

If you're using the Tree style, I'm not sure exactly where you can find the value of name... try using Data::Dumper to print out the tree and see where it shows up.

use Data::Dumper;
my $tree = $parser->parse($data);
print Dumper $tree;

[chromatic]

With the Tree style, each element node is an array. The first member is the name of that element, the second is a reference to an array (the content of that element). The first item of that array is a hash reference which contains any attributes (or nothing, if there are none). The data structure looks something like this:

[ "outside",
    [ "inside",
        [ { "name" => "Wibble"},
         0, "some data"]
    ]
]

Yuck.

[btrott]

Yeah, the Tree style is kind of icky, I think. :)

To the OP: if your XML file is pretty simple, you should try using XML::Simple. It loads your data into a nice hash-of-hashes tree.

use XML::Simple;
my $xml = XMLin("foo.xml");

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper $xml;

For your particular example, I got these results:

$VAR1 = {
          'inside' => {
                        'name' => 'Wibble',
                        'content' => 'some data'
                      }
        };

So you could get the contents of name like this:

my $name = $xml->{'inside'}{'name'};