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in reply to Re: Using Perl XML::SAX to modify XML documents
in thread Using Perl XML::SAX to modify XML documents

To answer my own question regarding merging/expanding elements, here is a snippet on how to do it with sax:

#!/usr/bin/perl package MyHandler; use strict; use warnings; use base qw(XML::SAX::Base); use Data::Dumper; use XML::SAX::ParserFactory; use XML::SAX::Writer; sub start_element { my $self = shift; my $data = shift; if( $data->{LocalName} eq 'expand') { $self->{in_include}++; my $p = XML::SAX::ParserFactory->parser( Handler => $self +); $p->parse_string( "<expanded>This is my expanded tag</expa +nded>" ); return; } #$data->{Attributes} = undef; $self->SUPER::start_element($data); #print Dumper($data); } sub characters { my $self = shift; my $data = shift; #print "Data is $data->{Data}" if defined $data->{Data}; $self->SUPER::characters($data); } sub end_element { my ($self, $element) = @_; if ($element->{LocalName} eq "expand") { $self->{in_include}--; } else { $self->SUPER::end_element($element); } } sub start_document { # same for end_document my($self, $data) = @_; return if($self->{in_include}); $self->SUPER::start_document($data); } sub end_document { # same for end_document my($self, $data) = @_; return if($self->{in_include}); $self->SUPER::end_document($data); } 1; #============================ #Main programm #============================ use strict; use warnings; use XML::SAX::ParserFactory; use XML::SAX::Writer; my $out; my $o = XML::SAX::Writer->new( Output => \$out ); my $h = MyHandler->new( Handler => $o ); my $p = XML::SAX::ParserFactory->parser(Handler => $h); my $data; { local undef $/ }; $data = <DATA>; $p->parse_string( $data ); print $out; __DATA__ <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:wicket="http://wi +cket.apache.org/dtds.data/wicket-xhtml1.4-strict.dtd"> <body> <wicket:panel> <form wicket:id="mvpForm"> <span>Edit Information: </span> <input type="checkbox" wicket:id="editForm"/> <span>Name: </span> <span wicket:id="name"></span> <input type="text" wicket:id="nameEdit"/> <span>Last Name: </span> <span wicket:id="lastName"></span> <input type="text" wicket:id="lastNameEdit"/> <span>DOB: </span> <span wicket:id="dob"></span> <input type="text" wicket:id="dobEdit"/> <span>Occupation: </span> <span wicket:id="occupation"></span> <input type="text" wicket:id="occupationEdit"/> <span>Gender: </span> <span wicket:id="gender"></span> <span wicket:id="genderEdit"/> <input type="submit" wicket:id="submit"/> <expand/> </form> </wicket:panel> </body> </html>

The `<expand/>` tag will be replaced by `<expanded>This is my expanded tag</expanded>`.

Basically all is needed is to create a new parser and hand it a file/string to be parsed. However, note that there are a couple of gotchas. The first one is to stop propagating the event where you have intercepted the tag to be expanded. In other words don't call $self->SUPER::start/end_element whenever expanding/nesting tags, that will prevent the replaced tag to end up in the output. Second, it's required to intercept start_document/end_document and skip calling the parent for those ones, otherwise the following error will be produced:

>Trying to pop context without push context at /usr/share/perl5/XML/NamespaceSupport.pm line 79, <DATA> chunk 1.

In other words some clean up fails:

>This message is being triggered because XML::NamespaceSupport does some initialisation on a start_document event and some cleanup on an end_document event. The problem is that with your code there will be a pair of these events for the main document and a nested pair for each included document. When the second end_document event occurs, there is nothing to clean up - hence the message.

Taken from here