Item Description: A line-oriended interface to XML

Review Synopsis: The module's main usage is through the pyx, pyxv, pyxw and pyxhtml tools

Description

XML::PYX, based on XML::Parser is the Perl implementation. It comes with 3 tools: pyx (non-validating) and pyxv (validating) output the Pyx version of the document and pyxw writes an XML version of a Pyx flow. See XML.com - Pyxie for a description of Pyxie

Why use PYX?

• you don't want to know to much about XML
• you are used to, and you like line-oriented tools
• you are just extracting some data from the XML document
• you are doing simple XML transformation

Why NOT use XML::PYX

• you want to do complex transformations
• you are more at ease with tree-processing
• you don't like writing all those regexps with \(
• you need some information from the XML documents that Pyx does not provide (comments, entity declarations...)

Related Module

XML::TiePYX is easier to use on a Windows system

Personal notes

Pyx is really cool to extract information from an XML file, or to perform simple transformations on simple XML files. The module is mature (it is quite simple so there shouldn't be too many bugs in it). I never actually use the module, only pyx, which I pipe to a perl -n or perl -p script.

Examples

Print all the elements used in an XML document, with the number of occurences.

pyx file.xml | perl -n -e '$nb{$1}++ if( m/\A\((.*)\n/); \
                            END { map { print "$_ used $nb{$_} time(s)\n";} sort keys %nb;}'
  

Warn in case of duplicate ID:

pyx file.xml | perl -n -e '($id)=( m/^Aid (.*)\n/) or next; print "duplicate id: $id\n" if($id{$id});  $id{$id}=1;'
  

Change a tag name (class to color):

pyx wine.xml | perl -p -e 's/^([()])class/$1color/' | pyxw