There are three approaches to this problem:

• The invocation hack - you take the console output and redirect it into a file:

  # Instead of
  >perl -w myscript.pl -some -command -line
  # you invoke it as
  >perl -w myscript.pl -some -command -line >output.xml
  [download]

• The ugly hack - you take the old console output and stuff it into a new file:

  BEGIN {
    my $outfile = 'output.xml';
    close STDOUT;
    open STDOUT, ">", $outfile
      or die "Couldn't create '$outfile': $!";
  };
  [download]

• The proper implementation: You rewrite all the code that generates output to either take a filehandle as parameter or to return a string. Usually, just returning a string is far nicer (but a bit slower), because it makes for easy, convenient testing:

  # Instead of
  sub frobnitz {
    my ($input) = @_;
    if ($input =~ /foo/) {
      $input =~ s!foo!frobnitz!g;
      print $input;
    };
  };
  
  # write:
  sub frobnitz {
    my ($input) = @_;
    if ($input =~ /foo/) {
      $input =~ s!foo!frobnitz!g;
      return "<foo>$input</foo>"
    } else {
      return $input;
    };
  };
  
  # ...
  print frobnitz($in);
  [download]

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