in reply to Comparing nodes in LibXML

After lunch I hacked this up that solves my problem. But there must be a better way...

sub _cmpXML( $$ ){
    # Pass in two XML nodes and return 0 if they are the same, else
    # lexographically compare the namespaces fist then the node names
    # (with out prefexes)
    my $n1 = shift or die;
    my $n2 = shift or die;
    my $ns1 = $n1->namespaceURI();
    my $ns2 = $n2->namespaceURI();
    $ns1 ne $ns2 and return $ns1 cmp $ns2;
    my $nn1 = $n1->nodeName();
    my $nn2 = $n2->nodeName();
    $nn1 =~ s/^[^\:]*:?//;
    $nn2 =~ s/^[^\:]*:?//;
    return $nn1 cmp $nn2;
}

[download]

There must be a built in for doing this, it is a bit inconceivable to me that this is not a common requirement

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Comparing nodes in LibXML
by tangent (Parson) on Sep 03, 2015 at 02:05 UTC 
    my $nn1 = $c1->localname();
my $nn2 = $c2->localname();
print "\$nn1 $nn1\n\$nn2 $nn2\n\n";

Output:

$nn1 Authors
$nn2 Authors

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

      localname is helpful. I missed it in the documentation. But it is only half the picture as it strips namespace information. Evven though it seems that namespaces are an abomination in XML I need to account for them. I am not generating the XML I have to eat.

[reply]
        You can get the prefix at the same time 
        my ($prefix,$name) = ( $node->prefix(), $node->localname() );

        [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom