Given that I wish to build an XML node that may contain plain text like:

<owner>
  John Smith
</owner>
[download]

Or it may contain a child node like:

<owner>
  <href>http://johnsmith.com</href>
</owner>
[download]

And the text/node that is to be added is obtained from a function that can return either, is there an XML::LibXML function that I can call that will call appendTextNode in the first case and appendChildNode in the second? If there is I cannot find it.

What I have:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use XML::LibXML;

# The XML Document
my $DOC = XML::LibXML->createDocument( "1.0", "UTF-8" );

# Set the root
my $root = $DOC->createElement('owner');
$DOC->setDocumentElement($root);


sub createOwner {
    if(rand() < 0.5){
    return "John Smith";
    }else{
    my $ret =  XML::LibXML::Element->new('href');
    $ret->appendTextNode('http://johnsmith.com');
    return $ret;
    }
}
my $owner = &createOwner();

if(ref($owner) eq 'XML::LibXML::Element'){
    $root->appendChild($owner);
}else{
    $root->appendTextNode($owner);
}

print $DOC."\n";
[download]

This returns either:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<owner>John Smith</owner>
[download]

OR

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<owner><href>http://johnsmith.com</href></owner>
[download]

What I want

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use XML::LibXML;

# The XML Document
my $DOC = XML::LibXML->createDocument( "1.0", "UTF-8" );

# Set the root
my $root = $DOC->createElement('owner');
$DOC->setDocumentElement($root);


sub createOwner {
    if(rand() < 0.5){
    return "John Smith";
    }else{
    my $ret =  XML::LibXML::Element->new('href');
    $ret->appendTextNode('http://johnsmith.com');
    return $ret;
    }
}

my $owner = &createOwner();
$root->appendChild($owner);

print $DOC."\n";
[download]

This will have an error:

XML::LibXML::Node::appendChild() -- nNode is not a blessed SV reference

in the case that the plain string is returned. I wish to avoid the testing in the calling function.

Worik

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