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

Hi, I have the following problem, i have a series of XML tags in an array from position 0-17 in my case. what i want to do just for viewing purposes to see a clean version of my xml is to add in 3 or 4 spaces or a tab to indent. so that if i have array: 
0 - <new>
1 - <mp3>
2 - <song title>
3 - </song title>
4 - </mp3>
5 - </new>

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with 6 items and thsoe are it's contents. i can print out: 
<new>
      <mp3>
            <song title>
            </song title>
      </mp3>
</new>

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if anyone can help that would be great. thx B

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Displaying XML
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Nov 25, 2002 at 23:24 UTC

    Like this? 

    #! perl -slw
use strict;
use constant INDENT_SIZE => 4;

my @xml = (
'<new>',
'<mp3>',
'<song title>',
'</song title>',
'</mp3>',
'</new>',
);

my $indent = 0;

for (@xml) {
    $indent -= INDENT_SIZE if m|^</|;
    print ' ' x $indent, $_;
    $indent += INDENT_SIZE if m|^<[^/]|;
}
__END__
C:\test>215754
<new>
    <mp3>
        <song title>
        </song title>
    </mp3>
</new>

C:\test>

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    Okay you lot, get your wings on the left, halos on the right. It's one size fits all, and "No!", you can't have a different color.
    Pick up your cloud down the end and "Yes" if you get allocated a grey one they are a bit damp under foot, but someone has to get them.
    Get used to the wings fast cos its an 8 hour day...unless the Govenor calls for a cyclone or hurricane, in which case 16 hour shifts are mandatory.
    Just be grateful that you arrived just as the tornado season finished. Them buggers are real work.

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Re: Displaying XML
by pg (Canon) on Nov 26, 2002 at 00:06 UTC
    The easiest way, is probably to use XML::Parser, and when you new it, say: 
    my $parser = new XML::Parser(Style => "Debug");

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    When you parse your XML file, or a chunk of XML msg, it will display it in a easy-to-view way, not exactly the way you want, but maybe you will find it is useful.
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[d/l]
      The easiest way, is probably to use XML::Parser

      The easiest way is probably to use an XML tool, but probably not XML::Parser, which is too low-level and quirky to be really considered easy to use.

      In this case you could just output the xml without bothering about the formating and then use a pretty-printer, like xml_pp or Tidy.

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      If you got LibXML installed (gnome) then you can use 
      xmllint --format infile.xml

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      ...and you get well-formedness checking for free ;-)

      --
      Cheers, Joe

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