Esteemed Monks,

Here's another one of those "the code works" but "is there a more efficient way of doing it". My definition of efficiency in this particular case would be speed.

The task is to parse attributes from the Root element of some XML (without launching another parser, XML::Parser et al). Here's a brief snippet of the XML in question:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE Root SYSTEM "/path-to/theDtd">
<Root Id="456990" Group="Navy" TimeStamp="20020116123446" Performance=
+"Regular" Database="gyt98x" Project="x">
   <Request>
      <DataForce>Premium</DataForce>
   </Request>
</Root>

[download]
Using the following code to obtain the attributes: 
sub parseRoot {
   my $xmlIn = shift;
   $_ = ${$xmlIn};
   my %rootAttr;
   while (m#(\S+?)="(\S+?)"#g) {
      ($1 eq 'version') && next; #skip the xml version
      $rootAttr{$1} = $2;
   }
   return \%rootAttr;
}

[download]

In reply to Preferred Methods (again) by vek

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