Monks,

Servers are down this morning, which gives me time to seek advice re best practice when using XML::Parser and strict. :-)

Basically, when writing event driven parsing scripts, I always find that I need to share some variables between the handlers. My question is, what’s the best way to do this? I offer a simple example, which prints the node elements neatly indented. 

use XML::Parser;
use strict;

parse_stuff();

sub parse_stuff {
    my $parser = new XML::Parser(Handlers => {Start => \&handle_start,
                                              End   => \&handle_end});
    no strict "vars";
    local $indent;
    $parser->parsefile('/tmp/ra.xml');
}

sub handle_start {
    my ($p, $el, %atts) = @_;
    our $indent;
    $indent++;
    print "-"x$indent . "$el\n";
}

sub handle_end {
    our $indent;
    $indent--;
}

[download]

I’m quite happy with this, as I don’t have any global variables (I know any previous $indent value will be temporarily trashed, but I can cope with that), I’ve got a shared variable (dynamically scoped) to use in my handlers, and my handlers explicitly pick up this shared variable. My main concern is that I’ve had to use ‘no strict subs’ define $indent, which makes me think I’ve done a bad thing, and that perhaps there’s a neater way of doing this, without having to turn off strict.

Thanks,

Rob

In reply to best practice when using XML::Parser and strict. by reasonablekeith

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