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

I was looking for a quick way to spit out XML from a data structure and came across XML::Smart. Nifty module. But I'm running into a stumbling block, which is that it is giving me attributes where I would like separate elements. My code is like this: 
my $xml = XML::Smart->new;
$xml->{Body} = { Foo => 'Bar' };
$xml->save("test.xml");

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and it is producing this output: 
<Body Foo="Bar"/>

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whereas I would like it to produce this output: 
<Body><Foo>Bar</Foo></Body>

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and was hoping there was a straightforward way to do so. Cheers,

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: force elements in XML::Smart
by GrandFather (Saint) on Apr 24, 2007 at 00:15 UTC

    XML::Smart seems just a bit too clever at times. You may like XML::Maker a bit better:

    use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::Maker;

my $xml = XML::Maker->new ('Body');
my $foo = $xml->subtag ('Foo');

$foo->subtag ('Bar');
print $xml->make ();

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    Prints:

    <Body><Foo>Bar</Foo></Body>

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    or an interesting alternative is to use XML::Spew:

    use strict;
use warnings;

package My::Spew;

use XML::Spew;
use base 'XML::Spew';

__PACKAGE__->_tags(qw/Body Foo/);

package main;

my $spew = My::Spew->_new ();

print $spew->Body ($spew->Foo ('Bar'));

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    which generates the same output.

    DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel
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Re: force elements in XML::Smart
by almut (Canon) on Apr 23, 2007 at 23:47 UTC

    According to the docs, the following should force it to be a node: 

    $xml->{Body} = { Foo => 'Bar' };
$xml->{Body}{Foo}->set_node(1);

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    Otherwise, there are heuristics like there being newlines (\n) in the content, that determine whether a node or an attribute is being created...  Cheers.

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Re: force elements in XML::Smart
by gube (Parson) on Apr 24, 2007 at 03:39 UTC

    Hi

    You can use XML::Simple module it will be simple. To parse xml or to create xml you can simply use XML::Simple. 
    use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;
my $xml_input = qq{<Body><Foo>Bar</Foo></Body>};
my $xml_simple = XML::Simple->new(KeepRoot => 1, KeyAttr => 1, ForceAr
+ray => 1);
my $result = $xml_simple->XMLin($xml_input);
print "\nParsed xml with output as reference..", Dumper($result);
my $result_xml = $xml_simple->XMLout($result);
print "\nConstructed xml using reference..", $result_xml;

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