Hello, In the past couple of days I managed to make a script that parses through a specific XML file and returns only a few values. To be more specific, the data is formated like this:

__DATA__
  <!-- Dog section -->

  <object type="Dog" >
    <property name="id" value="0" />
    <property name="name" value="REX" />
    <property name="status" value="alive" />
    <property name="mode" value="owned" />
    <property name="dog_breed_id" value="0" />
    <property name="dog_breed_name" value="Husky" />
    <property name="capacity" value="105" />
    <property name="size" value="big" />
    <property name="location" value="canada" />
  </object >
[download]

This is just an example and not the actual values but you get the idea. There will also be several of these "objects" one after another. The script I made used the Tree style, I'm now trying to create one using Stream. The only info I want to extract is the name, the dog_breed_id, and the dog_breed_name. I would like the output to be simple and only seperated by commas, like this:

REX,0,Husky

I'm a novice programmer but I'm a pretty quick learner so don't be shy. My main purpose is to make it run faster but also to learn how to use different methods of parsing data.

Edit: For those interested, I used XML::Rules, this is what the final code looks like.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
use vars qw/ %options /;
use Getopt::Std;
use XML::Rules;

# How to use the script
sub Usage(){
    print STDERR "
    Usage : $0 [-arg file] 

    arg:
    -i : load information from XML file
    
    \n";
    exit 2;

}

my $opt_string = 'i:'; my $File; my %options;
getopts("$opt_string", \%options );
Usage unless ( %options );
foreach ( (my $key) = (keys %options) ){ $File = $options{$key}; }
Usage unless(-f $File);

my @rules = (
  object => sub {
    if( $_[1]{type} eq 'dog' ){
    print join(",", @{$_[1]}{qw(dog_brd_id dog_brd_name name)}),"\n";
    return;
    }
        elsif($_[1]{type} eq 'cat'){
        XML::Rules->return_nothing;
        }
  },
    property => sub {$_[1]->{name} => $_[1]->{value}},
);
my $xr = XML::Rules->new( rules => \@rules, stripspaces => 2 );
$xr->parsefile($File);
[download]

This obviously depends that the Dog section comes before the Cat section. Using this method though, I was able to bring the real time from 20s to 0.5s. Thanks to everyone who helped!!

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