http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=82075

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

I'm trying to use XML to organize my Web bookmarks. The first structure that comes to my mind is something similar to:
<bookmark> <link category="Perl" name="Perlmonks" url="http://www.perlmonks.org"> <description>Perl Monastery</description> </link> <link category="Perl" name="Perl.com" url="http://www.perl.com"> <description>Perl Official Site</description> </link> <link category="Macintosh" name="Macity" url="http://www.macity.it"> <description>Macintosh news site (italian resource)</description> </link> </bookmark>
It's link-oriented, so when I want to add another link to the file I can simply use another <link> block filling it with the appropriata informations. So far so good.

Now I'd like to use these XML file to produce a tree of HTML pages containing my links organized by category. What I have to do is to convert a link-oriented structure to a category-oriented one.

I wrote this piece of code:

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use XML::Simple; use Data::Dumper; my $bookmark = XMLin( './links.xml' ); # print Dumper( $bookmark ); # Data structure conversion my $bookmark_by_category = {}; foreach my $n (keys %{$bookmark->{link}}) { push @{ $bookmark_by_category->{ $bookmark->{link}->{$n}->{'catego +ry'} }}, { 'Name' => $n, 'Url' => $bookmark->{link}->{$n}->{'url'}, 'Description' => $bookmark->{link}->{$n}->{'description'}, }; } print Dumper( $bookmark_by_category );

It is simple but since:

  1. I'm new to XML manipulation
  2. It seems to me it's a standard problem so I guess there's a standard solution
  3. I don't want to pollute the environment with re-invented wheels...
I ask you if there's that standard solution I was talking about above.