That misses the point. The calling function does not know, and the called function does not care.

The answer I have come up with is a wrapper function that does what I want XML::LibXML to do:

sub _addNode {
    my ($parent, $child) = @_;
    if(ref($child) eq 'XML::LibXML::Element'){
    $parent->appendChild($child);
    }elsif(ref($child) eq ''){
    $parent->appendTextNode($child);
    }else{
    die "'_addNode child is type: ".ref($child).
        " Do not know what to do with that";
    }
    return $parent;
}

[download]

Is the answer to my original question "yes" or "no"?

To be rule compliant here is the runnable code....

#!/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;
    }
}

sub _addNode {
    my ($parent, $child) = @_;
    if(ref($child) eq 'XML::LibXML::Element'){
    $parent->appendChild($child);
    }elsif(ref($child) eq ''){
    $parent->appendTextNode($child);
    }else{
    die "'_addNode child is type: ".ref($child).
        " Do not know what to do with that";
    }
    return $parent;
}
my $owner = &createOwner();
$root = &_addNode($root, $owner);
print $DOC."\n";

[download]

In reply to Re^2: XML::LibXML creating nodes with a string OR a node by worik
in thread XML::LibXML creating nodes with a string OR a node by worik

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