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Re: Module for XML output

by saberworks (Curate)
on Jan 10, 2012 at 20:19 UTC ( [id://947234]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Module for XML output

I wrote this originally on blogs.perl.org: Using XML::Compile to output XSD compliant XML. It may help if you decide to make an XSD file.

As part of a recent project I was given an XSD file (xml schema definition) and asked to output compliant XML. CPAN to the rescue. I found XML::Compile::Schema which is a cool module that allowed me to do this with very little fuss. The documentation is really good but I think a tutorial-style post might be helpful.

To do this you’ll need to install XML::Compile and XML::LibXML.

You can use XML::Compile::Schema to read in your xsd file and output a perl hash template. Then you can use that example template to construct a hash of real data and then have XML::Compile::Schema output a valid XML file.

For this tutorial, download a sample .xsd file from here. Then write a perl script like so to dump a perl hash template.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl use warnings; use strict; use Data::Dumper; use XML::Compile::Schema; use XML::LibXML::Reader; my $xsd = 'test.xsd'; my $schema = XML::Compile::Schema->new($xsd); # This will print a very basic description of what the schema describe +s $schema->printIndex(); # this will print a hash template that will show you how to construct +a # hash that will be used to construct a valid XML file. # # Note: the second argument must match the root-level element of the X +ML # document. I'm not quite sure why it's required here. warn $schema->template('PERL', 'addresses');

The relevant output looks like this:

# is an unnamed complex { # sequence of address # is an unnamed complex # occurs 1 <= # <= unbounded times address => [ { # sequence of name, street # is a xs:string # is optional name => "example", # is a xs:string # is optional street => "example", }, ], }

The comments are helpful (and were provided by XML::Compile::Schema directly, not by me). It basically says your data structure should start as a hashref which should contain an entry called “address” which is a reference to an array. This array should be a list of hash references which each contain two elements, name and street.

From this you can deduce that a valid hash will look something like this.

my $data = { address => [ { name => 'name 1', street => 'street 1', }, { name => 'name 2', street => 'street 2', } ], };

In order to output the XML, you have to do this:

my $doc = XML::LibXML::Document->new('1.0', 'UTF-8'); my $write = $schema->compile(WRITER => 'addresses'); my $xml = $write->($doc, $data); $doc->setDocumentElement($xml); print $doc->toString(1); # 1 indicates "pretty print"

My output looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <addresses> <address> <name>name 1</name> <street>street 1</street> </address> <address> <name>name 2</name> <street>street 2</street> </address> </addresses>

The actual XSD and resulting XML files I was dealing with were much more complicated but I followed this process and had no trouble whatsoever.

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