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

Hello Monks,

A few days ago I asked a question here about how to use an XML spellcheck service and a gentleman here show me a sample code using SOAP::WDSL and it works great. Please see: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=651558 . The data I got back from the SOAP service is in this format: 
$VAR1 = {
          'body' => 'thi is a test',
          'ver' => '1.0',
          'MisspelledWordCount' => '1',
          'MisspelledWord' => {
                              'SuggestionCount' => '25',
                              'word' => 'thi',
                              'Suggestions' => [
                                               'ti',
                                               't hi',
                                               'the',
                                               'phi',
                                               'tho',
                                               'thy',
                                               'chi',
                                               'th',
                                               'this',
                                               'thin',
                                               'hi',
                                               'thing',
                                               'thaw',
                                               'Thai',
                                               'their',
                                               'then',
                                               'thee',
                                               'thou',
                                               'thew',
                                               'they',
                                               'thigh',
                                               'Thia',
                                               'thaws',
                                               'Thu',
                                               'theirs'
                                             ]
                            }
        };

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so I assigned it to a hash variable %result = Dumper($som->paramsall); but I can not acess this data using print "$result{'MisspelledWordCount'}";
so my question really is how do I access these data without manually using the pattern matching technique such as $result = /MisspelledWordCount/ ?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Help With Parsing XML format / Hash of Hashes
by GrandFather (Saint) on Nov 23, 2007 at 23:52 UTC

    If what you did was as shown then you should have received a heads up along the lines of: Odd number of elements in hash assignment at .... You do use strictures (use strict; use warnings;) don't you?

    What was returned would have been a hash reference which you need to assign to a scalar:

    my $result = subReturningHashRef ();

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    which you then access fields of by:

    print "Found $result->{MisspelledWordCount} miss-spelled words\n";

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    Perl is environmentally friendly - it saves trees
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      Thanks for your response. I got an error when I put in the line my $result = subReturningHashRef();
      Undefined subroutine &main::subReturningHashRef called
      Here is my complete code: 
      #!/usr/bin/perl
use HTML::Template;
use CGI qw(:standard);
use CGI::Carp qw(warningsToBrowser fatalsToBrowser);
use SOAP::WSDL;
use Data::Dumper;

# config vars
my $tocheck = param('text');
#my $license = '12345yourlicensekey';
my $service = 'http://ws.cdyne.com/SpellChecker/check.asmx';
my $wsdl    = "$service?WSDL";

# initialise the SOAP proxy object
my $soap = SOAP::WSDL->new();
$soap->wsdl($wsdl);
$soap->on_action(sub { return $_[0].$_[1]; }); # uncomment if you get 
+a soapfault containing something like 'invalid method specification'.
$soap->proxy($service);
$soap->wsdlinit(caching => 1)
  || die "couldn't connect to soap service!";

# call the CheckTextBody method exposed by the web-service
my $som = $soap->CheckTextBody(
   BodyText   => $tocheck,
   LicenseKey => $license);

# examine the result returned by the web-service
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "<html>";
print "<head>";
print "<title>OS2 - Lab3 Project</title>";
print "</head>";
print "<body>";
print qq{<center><b><font size="+3">Online Spellchecker via SOAP and X
+ML</b></center>};
print "<br>";
print qq{<form method="post" action="lab3.cgi">};
print "<table>";
print qq{<tr><td>Enter Text:</td><td>Word:</td></tr>};
print qq{<tr><td rowspan="12" valign="top"><textarea cols="45" rows="1
+2" name="text">$tocheck</textarea>};
print qq{</td><td><input type="text" name="word" value=""></td></tr>};
print qq{<tr><td>Suggestions:</td></tr>};
print qq{<tr><td rowspan="8"><select size="10">};
print qq{<option value =" ">---------------End---------------</option>
+};
print qq{</select></td>};
print qq{</tr>};
print qq{<tr></tr><tr></tr><tr></tr><tr></tr><tr></tr><tr></tr><tr></t
+r><tr></tr><tr></tr></tr><tr></tr>};
print qq{<tr><td><input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit">};
print qq{</td><td><input type="submit" name="Replace" value="Replace">
+</td></tr>};
print "</table>";
print "<br>";
print "<br>";
print "<b>XML Data Received:</b>";
print "<br>";
if ($som->fault) {
$result = $som->faultstring;
print qq{<textarea cols="55" rows="10" name="response">$result</textar
+ea>};

} else {

$result = Dumper($som->paramsall);
#%result1 = $som->paramsall;
#%result1 = $result;
#$value = $result1{'body'};
$result = subReturningHashRef ();


print qq{<textarea cols="45" rows="10" name="response">$result->{Missp
+elledWordCount}</textarea>};

}

print "<br>";
print "</form>";

print "</body>";
print "</html>";

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Re: Help With Parsing XML format / Hash of Hashes
by Anonymous Monk on Nov 24, 2007 at 03:22 UTC
    OK, I played with it all day and seems to get some of the data out of those hashes by assigning variables as this: 
    $result = $som->paramsall;
$result1 = $result->{'MisspelledWord'};
$nosuggestions = $result1->{'SuggestionCount'};
$mistake = $result1->{'word'};

$suggestion = $result1->{'Suggestions'};

    [download]
    I am unable to get to the $result1->{'Suggestions'} since there are so many values in it. Could someone please show me how to access this structure. Thanks.
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[d/l]
      e.g., to access the second element of the array of suggestions, use 

      my $second_suggestion = $result1->{'Suggestions'}[1];

      [download]

      to get a copy of the entire array of suggestions, use 

      my @suggestions = @{ $result1->{'Suggestions'} };

      [download]

      see the Perl Data Structures Cookbook perldsc for more info and related links.

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