Error parsing XML

Hammy has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello again, I have an XML stream that I am trying to process and I can not figure out how. The problem I am running into is sometimes one of the nodes is coming back with multiple nodes in an array and sometimes it is not. How do I check what the format is before continuing. It is either going to be:

$NRE_ID = $XMLref->{'diffgr:diffgram'}->{'NewDataSet'}->{'Table'}->[0]
+->{'CLIENT_ID'};

or 

$NRE_ID = $XMLref->{'diffgr:diffgram'}->{'NewDataSet'}->{'Table'}->{'C
+LIENT_ID'};
[download]

WHen I use one or the other I get an error. I'd love to say if blah do else do. This seems like a really simple issue, but I can not figure it out from documentation. Building the XML is as follows:

$XMLref = XMLin($returnStr, suppressempty => '');
$xmlstream = Dumper($XMLref);
[download]

Thanks.

Comment on Error parsing XML Select or Download Code

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Re: Error parsing XML by GrandFather (Saint) on Mar 01, 2006 at 04:19 UTC
You can use `ref` to detect the type of thing you have: `use strict; use warnings; my $array = []; my $hash = {}; print ref $array, "\n"; print ref $hash, "\n";` [download] Prints: `ARRAY HASH` [download] DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Error parsing XML by Hammy (Scribe) on Mar 01, 2006 at 04:31 UTC
Thank you ever so much, that did the trick.	[reply]
Re^2: Error parsing XML by grantm (Parson) on Mar 02, 2006 at 07:53 UTC
You can use ref to detect the type of thing you have Yes you can, but in this case it would be better to use XML::Simple's ForceArray option to ensure that the 'Table' elements are always represented as an array. That way you use the same code to process them regardless of whether there's one or many. More info here.	[reply]