http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=62809

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

Hi Guys, Problem in a nutshell: I cannot retrieve Text node data. I am very new to Perl but need to use it for a project I am involved with. I need to write an XML parser that uses DOM that plugs into the back of apache.
My environment is: Solaris 2.6 Perl 5.6.0 Apache 1.3.12 Mod-perl 1.24 XML::Parser 2.27 XML::DOM 1.25 An example of the XML I am parsing is: <methodCall>Level1 Text <Level2a>Text at Level2a</Level2a> <Level2b>Text at Level2b</Level2b> </methodCall>
(In practice it will be more complex, but that is enough for now..) An exerept from my apache module code is.... (The xml arrives in $buf having been poked in over a socket) and it is all called from the handler() routine.
my $parser = new XML::DOM::Parser; $doc = $parser->parse( $buf ) or die "Unable to parse document"; $root = $doc->getFirstChild(); scanner($root); sub scanner { my ($rt) = @_; my $i; my $nde; my $ndeLst = $rt->getChildNodes(); my $numndes = $ndeLst->getLength() - 1; for ( $i = 0; $i < $numndes; $i++ ) { $nde = $ndeLst->item( $i ); if ($nde->getNodeType() == TEXT_NODE ) { $log->info( $i.$nde->getNodeValue()); print $i,"TEXT", $nde->getData(); } if ($nde->getNodeType == ELEMENT_NODE) { $log->info( $i.$nde->getNodeName()); print $i, "ELEMENT ", $nde->getNodeName(), "\n"; } scanner( $nde ); } }
Although the output is ugly, I believe I should be able to retrieve the Elements <tags> and the text (data). What I actually get is:
0TEXTLevel1 Text 1ELEMENT Level2a 2TEXT 3ELEMENT Level2b
The text elements seem to be lots of white space. I don't think you have to worry about casting in perl so I don't understand why I cannot retrieve the textual data. I do get the first level though. Incidently calling a $root->toString() prints everything so I know it is getting into the tree ok. I would greatly appreciate any advice from you perl gurus out there as I have spent many hours on this without any results !