You could also generate a SAX provider for your format, which would allow you to use for example XML::SAX::Writer to output it. What you get with this method is the automatic escaping of text, and the ease of adding other XML constructs, attributes, comments... when you need it. See Perl SAX 2.0 Binding for more info.

Here is a code example:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use XML::SAX::Writer;

my $DEBUG=0; # set to 1 to debug

my $w = XML::SAX::Writer->new; # see the man for XML::SAX::Writer to o
+utput to  file
$w->start_document();

# in your example you don't have a root element, so you need one
my $root= 'root';
$w->start_element( { Name => $root, });

while( <DATA>)
  { # the split will return (char, tag, char, tag, char...)
    # the list always starts and ends with a char
    my @tokens= split( m{\[\[             # [[
                             ([^\]]*)     #   tag
                                     \]\] #      ]]
                         }x
                     ); 

    print join( ' - ', map { "'$_'" } @tokens), "\n" if( $DEBUG);

    while( @tokens)
      { my $chars= shift @tokens;
        $w->characters( { Data => $chars} );

        my $tag= shift @tokens or last;
        if( $tag=~ m{^/(.*)$})
          { $w->end_element( { Name => $1 }); }
         else
          { $w->start_element( { Name => $tag }); }
      }
  } 

$w->end_element( { Name => $root, });
$w->end_document;

__DATA__
[[a]] some text here[[/a]]
[[b]] some more text [[/b]]
[[a]] some text again[[c]]more here..[[/c]]
[[/a]]
[[a]] some text again[[c]]more here..[[/c]][[/a]]

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In reply to Re: using perl to convert to xml file by mirod
in thread using perl to convert to xml file by lily123

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