http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=454607

graff has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I need to pass XML data through a filter that will transform the character data but leave the tags as-is. (The transform involves converting certain ASCII characters to utf8 Arabic characters, so I have to make sure this doesn't apply to the tags).

XML::Parser, with the "Style" set to "Stream" makes this very easy and clear, but there's one problem: if the input contains empty tags like this:

<sometag attr1="v1" attr2="v2"/>
it'll come out looking like this:
<sometag attr1="v1" attr2="v2"></sometag>
Am I just being too picky? Is it too much to ask that empty tags be kept empty? Here's a brief snippet that demonstrates the behavior:
use XML::Parser; $xml = qq{<tag attr="xyz"/>}; print "original: $xml\n"; $parser = new XML::Parser( Style => 'Stream' ); print "parsed: "; $parser->parse( $xml ); print "\n"; sub StartTag { print }