The question came to me one afternoon, "how long would it take you to write a Perl script that would remove a specific character from within XML tags?"

I replied,

A quick and dirty (i.e., error prone) would take minutes.

To use a real XML parser and guarantee that I don’t corrupt the file in the process might take a couple hours because I’m actually not that familiar with XML.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you could ask the question politely at perlmonks.org and get it written for free in about a half hour.

This was a need-it-now situation, so we went with the quick and dirty: 

use strict;
use warnings;

while (<>) {
    s{(<[^?<>]*\.[^<>]*>)}{
        (my $tagname = $1 ) =~ tr/.//d;
        $tagname;
    }eg;
    print;
}

[download]

The input to deal with looks like this: 

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<TOP>
  <SUB>
    <THIS>STUFF</THIS>
    <SOME.TYPE>T</SOME.TYPE>
    <SOME.OTHER.TYPE>BLAH</SOME.OTHER.TYPE>
  </SUB>
</TOP>

[download]

The problem is the dots in the tag names. They need to be stripped out. The output should look like this: 

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<TOP>
  <SUB>
    <THIS>STUFF</THIS>
    <SOMETYPE>T</SOMETYPE>
    <SOMEOTHERTYPE>BLAH</SOMEOTHERTYPE>
  </SUB>
</TOP>

[download]

Note that my first implementation actually took the dot out of "<?xml version="1.0"?>". Luckily I had the good sense to look at a 'diff' before I stopped debugging.

So, monks, I seek your wisdom. What is the right way to do this so that I don't someday accidentally annihilate some important input? Any guidance you can offer would be appreciated.

In reply to Replace XML tag names. by kyle

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