This is more of a FYI than a question, but anyway...

I just spent the best part of a couple of hours trying to work out why this worked:

use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::Simple;
my $x = XMLin('./test.xml');
[download]

yet this didn't

use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::Simple;
use POE::Component::Jabber::XMPP;
my $x = XMLin('./test.xml');
[download]

Turns out one the Jabber module loads POE::Filter::XML, which in turn loads XML::SAX

When this happens, XML::Simple defaults to the SAX parser, screwing up filename arguments.

The solution is to add:

$XML::Simple::PREFERRED_PARSER = 'XML::Parser';

to the script, but that feels clutzy.

I'm pondering on whether there's a better approach for the XML::Simple module, and would welcome input before I send an email to the module's owner. It doesn't seem right to me that a module's behaviour would change just by loading another module. Or am I just not being lazy enough? ;-) Thoughts?