Re: Accessing mixed content in XML

[izut]

Your XML should be like this:

<function name="showImage">
    <data>A random picture</data>
    <argument><![CDATA[<img src="test.jpg">]]></argument>
    <argument>0</argument>
</function>

Now the perl code:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;

my $ref = XMLin(\*DATA);
print Dumper $ref;

__DATA__
<function name="showImage">
    <data>A random picture</data>
    <argument><![CDATA[<img src="test.jpg">]]></argument>
    <argument>0</argument>
</function>

The results:

$VAR1 = {
          'argument' => [
                        '<img src="test.jpg">',
                        '0'
                      ],
          'name' => 'showImage',
          'data' => 'A random picture'
        };

You can read more about XML specs here or searching in Google.

Update:If you use XML::Simple to create the XML file, it will automagically convert ">" or "<" to &gt; and &lt;.

[anthski]

Igor,

Thanks very much for your well explained solution, example code and the links. I'll do some reading about XML.

If I'd known about CDATA and XML::Simple supporting it, I'd have probably stuck with XML::Simple. For now, using > and < is working nicely with XML::DOM.

Thanks again.

[mirod]

Instead of XML::DOM you might want to have a look at XML::LibXML, which gives you a lot more than XML::DOM: XPath (very, VERY useful), RelaxNG, Xinclude, HTML parser, better performances... As it implements the DOM porting code from XML::DOM to XML::LibXML is also very easy (usually all you have to do is changing the names of a few constants).