Hello Monks, I have an xml file formatted in a not so neat way and I need to extract all of the information I can from it. Here's an example.

<IRETURNVALUE>
<INSTANCE CLASSNAME="junk"><PROPERTY NAME="ID"><DISPLAY TYPE="string">
+A0</DISPLAY><VALUE TYPE="string">a0</VALUE></PROPERTY><PROPERTY NAME=
+"state"><DISPLAY TYPE="string">Active</DISPLAY><VALUE TYPE="string">a
+ctive</VALUE></PROPERTY>...</INSTANCE>
<INSTANCE CLASSNAME="junk"><PROPERTY NAME="ID"><DISPLAY TYPE="string">
+A1</DISPLAY><VALUE TYPE="string">a1</VALUE></PROPERTY><PROPERTY NAME=
+"state"><DISPLAY TYPE="string">Active</DISPLAY><VALUE TYPE="string">a
+ctive</VALUE></PROPERTY>...</INSTANCE>
</IRETURNVALUE>
[download]

Each of these lines has about 8 or 9 different properties. What I need to do is to store each of these lines in a %data hash using the ID as the key. My preference is to use XML::Rules to do this, but I'm open to any suggestions using XML::Parser or XML::Twig. So far my pseudocode looks something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::Rules;

my %data;

 my @rules = (
 my $id; #$id will be the _content of DISPLAY after the Property Name
 my $var; #$var will be the _content of DISPLAY 
        PROPERTY => sub {
            if ($_[1]{NAME} eq "id"){
                $data{$id} = {};
                        }
                        else ($data{$id} = {$_[1]{NAME} => $var})
                
            }
        },    
        DISPLAY => sub {#some code to initialize $var};

my $xr = XML::Rules->new( rules => \@rules, stripspaces => 2 );
$xr->parse(<DATA>);
[download]

This is more or less the direction I was taking. Hope I was clear enough.

Edit : Solved, not the most elegant way to solve it but it does the job.

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

#.....
# Code to treat file
#.....

my %data;
my $temp; my $id; my $trigger = 0;

my @rules = (
        PROPERTY => sub {
            if ($_[1]{NAME} eq "id"){ 
                $data{$id} = {}; #Creates empty hash using the id as t
+he key
                $trigger = 1;
                }
            elsif ($_[1]{NAME} eq "class"){ #class is the last tag bef
+ore the new line
                $data{$id} -> {@{$_[1]}{NAME}} = $temp;  
                $trigger = 0; #this resets the trigger to let the scri
+pt know that the next property is 
                }                    #going to be the id
                else {
                $data{$id} -> {@{$_[1]}{NAME}} = $temp;
                }
        },    
        DISPLAY => sub {
            if ($trigger == 0){
                $id = @{$_[1]}{_content};
            }
            else {
                $temp = @{$_[1]}{_content};
            }
        }, 
);

my $xr = XML::Rules->new( rules => \@rules, stripspaces => 2 );
$xr->parsefile($File);

print Dumper(\%data);
[download]

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