hola perl dudes & dudettes;

obwarning:

this question might interest those who have a mild interest in XML::Dumper or serialization more... than those who don't.

the problem:

in an attempt to serialize certain pesky struct-alikes as fashionably as possible, i turned to module XML::Dumper, which does the job very slinkily indeed. however, i have been puzzled by the behaviour of 2 core functions in this module: xml_compare, and xml_identity, both of which take chunks of xml and, well, inform about "identity in content" of xml and "identity in instantiation".

here is an example of their use:
use XML::Dumper;

my $struct = {
    "ferret" => ["sredni", "vashtar"],
    "hen" =>   "anabaptist",
};

my $xdumper = new XML::Dumper;

# generate xml equiv to struct
my $ssxmlified = $xdumper->pl2xml($struct);

# write it to file as well
$xdumper->pl2xml($struct, "oot.txt");

# reconstitute our struct from the file
my $structreconstituted = $xdumper->xml2pl("oot.txt");

# generate xml===reconstituted struct
$rexmlified = $xdumper->pl2xml($structreconstituted);

my $sscequal = $xdumper->xml_compare($rexmlified, $ssxmlified);
my $ssiequal = $xdumper->xml_identity($rexmlified, $ssxmlified);

printf "xml_compare: %s\n", ($sscequal? "true" : "false");
printf "xml_identity:%s\n", ($ssiequal? "true" : "false");

[download]
although the xml generated is entirely the same in content (*not* memory locations), neither xml_compare nor xml_identity return true. the latter i understand, the former frustrates me, as i was hoping to use it to check whether 2 data structures were equal in content.
does anyone know of any way, slick or otherwise, to achieve this goal?
thanks for any response.

In reply to XML::Dumper: Nifty or Naughty? by wufnik

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