As with many questions, the more complex your requirements, the more complex the tool you need to deal with it. XML::Simple may do some of this, even possibly all of it. But whether it will work or not really depends on the structure of your document. Complex documents aren't handled, simple ones are, however, trivial. That's just the tradeoff.

I first had to use perl with a complex XML document. So when I investigated all the options I could find at the time, I found XML::Twig, and found it could do everything I needed. I believe it can do all of the above, although I'm not sure how much of your XPath requirements it will meet - it's got good enough XPath support for my needs, but I can't tell if it'll meet yours.

In reply to Re: XML Parsing Suggestions? by Tanktalus
in thread XML Parsing Suggestions? by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.