I would definitely use
XML::LibXML or
XML::XSH2. But they work differently to
XML::Twig or
XML::Simple. It's best to work directly on the DOM object instead of creating a structure that you need to serialize back to XML later.
It's a bit garrulous, but something like this creates the same structure from the ;xmlstyle=flat:
#! /usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dump qw{ pp };
use XML::LibXML;
sub with_id {
my ($dom, $xpath) = @_;
return { name => $dom->findvalue("normalize-space($xpath)"),
id => $dom->findvalue("$xpath/\@id"), }
}
my $dom = 'XML::LibXML'->load_xml(IO => *DATA);
my %node = (
author => with_id($dom, '/node/author'),
type => with_id($dom, '/node/type'),
);
@node{qw{ created updated title }}
= @{ $dom->findnodes('/node')->[0] }{qw{ created updated title }};
@node{qw{ content parent root reputation }}
= map $dom->findvalue("/node/$_"),
qw( doctext parent_node root_node reputation );
print pp \%node;
__DATA__
...
map{substr$_->[0],$_->[1]||0,1}[\*||{},3],[[]],[ref qr-1,-,-1],[{}],[sub{}^*ARGV,3]