I suppose I would put the XML::Twig::Elt docs into XML::Twig::Elt itself (or, if you have the code for XML::Twig::Elt inside XML/Twig.pm, put the pod into XML/Twig/Elt.pod). The docs are so long, it's hard to get one's head around it all. Maybe even an XML/Twig/Tutorial.pod would be nice (is there one and I'm not aware of it? If so - please put that in XML::Twig's pod! :->). The tutorial itself could just be a cookbook TOC - and there could be XML/Twig/Tutorial/NewTwig.pod (starting without any XML), XML/Twig/Tutorial/Load.pod (loading from string/file), XML/Twig/Tutorial/Handlers.pod, etc.

Too flexible: 

$ perldoc XML::Twig | grep -i same.*as | wc -l
     51

[download]
You have a lot of options which duplicate each other. This simply helps obscure the unique options. I was trying to remember how to paste a twig inside another twig. Except that I didn't know it was called paste ;-). It took me probably 45-60 seconds of scanning the docs to find it. I found many ways to set the tag (gi, set_gi, tag, set_tag, ... did I miss any?), before getting paste. I also found (maybe this is just me) that paste was counterintuitive. I was expecting to tell the parent object what to insert, rather than telling the child object what its new parent is. So the first time I ran the above code, I had the create_element($k, $v) mixed up with the $t on the paste line. Of course, it didn't work. And, of course, you can't change this without breaking existing code.

Don't get me wrong - XML::Twig is great. It has made me look good in my job (which is always important). And the fact that my successor on that project is creating XML by simply printing it out is, I'm sure, going to come back and bite him in the arse. (It's not quite the same physical project - just the same idea.) It just provides, in my experience, a significant learning curve. That said, when I chose to use it, I did look at as many of the XML parsers and handlers as I could on CPAN before choosing XML::Twig. And choose it I did. Because, as you sort of implied, it's the most perlish solution, IMO.

In reply to XML::Twig flexibility (was Re^3: Outputting a hash as XML) by Tanktalus
in thread Outputting a hash as XML by smeenz

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