in reply to Parsing XML with XML::Simple

The problem is that you don't have a well-formed XML file. If it were well-formed,
there would be a root element, which is the ancestral of every other ones. Something like this: 

<root>
<CVS>
$Id: File_Find.pl,v 1.1 2006-12-17 19:25:03 eric Exp $
</CVS>
<DATE>2006-12-10</DATE>
...
<ARTICLE>
foo bar baz
</ARTICLE>
</root>

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I think if you do this simple correction, XML::Simple will work right for you. And, by the default,
this root element disappears, so that you'll get at the first level a hash with the keys you want:
CVS, ARTICLE, DATE, etc.

You could always try your XML files against a typical browser (like FireFox, Opera, IE, etc.)
to see if they are well-formed or if some error is pointed.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Parsing XML with XML::Simple
by madbombX (Hermit) on Dec 18, 2006 at 01:03 UTC
    You hit the nail on the head. Everything I had worked just fine. The problem is that when I ran it through Firefox, I noticed that a few points throughout the articles, I have the author emails in the following format: 
    First Last <this@that.com>

    [download]

    That messed everything up and all my original code actually works. Is there a way around that using XML::Simple or XML::Twig so that I don't have to go through EVERY file and remove all instances of that?

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[d/l]
      The big issue is that if you have First Last <this@that.com> within your XML, you have bad XML. (It should be First Last &lt;this@that.com&gt;.) It is better to fix these files. I am not sure how you came into this, because XML::Simple usually escapes these things: 
      $ perl -MXML::Simple -e "print XMLout({ a => 'a <b>' })"
<opt a="a &lt;b&gt;" />

      [download]

      It could be the version you're using. The example above used 

      $ which_pm XML::Simple
XML::Simple       2.13    c:/tools/apache/Perl/site/lib/XML/Simple.pm

      [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
        I am using XML::Simple version 2.14. I came into this because part of my company policy requires us, in our CVS headers to have that line as part of the template for documents/scripts/etc that go into CVS. Therefore, the XML files that are turned into articles all have those within the top 5 lines. Neither XML::Simple or XML::Twig handle this properly.
[reply]

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