Re^2: Get data from an XML file heading

[nachtmsk]

Thanks. I didn't think it looked like XML Because it didn't have an ending and it has multiple values for one, node, I guess you would call it.

I thought XML looks more like below...

<myId>757</myId> <address> 445 smith</address>

The data I get at the top of the file has one node name "result_summary" no ending tag/node and multiple values within the node.

Thanks for the solution though.

[haukex]

I didn't think it looked like XML Because it didn't have an ending and it has multiple values for one, node, I guess you would call it.

It's known as an "empty-element" tag, <element /> is equivalent to <element></element>, and the values within the tag itself are attributes. See e.g. https://www.w3schools.com/xml/.

[nachtmsk]

Thanks again.

One more thing. Not sure if I understand what this line of code is doing. It looks like it's taking the first element of the array called 'nodes' and converting it into a hash called attrs. Is that correct?

my %attrs = %{ $nodes[0] };

[haukex]

It looks like it's taking the first element of the array called 'nodes' and converting it into a hash called attrs. Is that correct? my %attrs = %{ $nodes[0] };

Almost right, it's not exactly converting, it's doing a hash dereference, see perlreftut and perlref. Basically:

my %hash = ( foo => "bar" );
my $hashref = \%hash;        # take a reference to the hash
print $hashref->{foo},"\n";  # acccess a value via the ref
my %attrs = %{ $hashref };   # makes a shallow copy

(In this case, there's a slightly more complicated thing going on in the background, that you don't necessarily need to care about. $nodes[0] is an object, which provides a special behavior when you use it like a hash reference: it returns the attributes of the element as a hash. That's why I can use this object as if it were a hash reference and dereference it, even though it's a much more complex object than just the attributes in a hash - I can call methods on it, etc. It's documented in XML::LibXML::Element under "Overloading".)