I'm not sure I follow your suggestion fully though.

As I said, I'm trying to pre-check some XML before I let XML::Parser do its magic.

my $parser = XML::Parser->new(
    Handlers => {
        Start => \&s_start,
        End   => \&s_end,
        Final => \&s_final,
    }
);

my %device_info = $parser->parse($fh);
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It's the call to parse with a parameter of $fh that I'm not sure how to change. I need to peek inside $fh beforehand and set up different parser handler routines, depending on what I see. If I sneak a look before calling the parser, the first few lines of XML are lost and it dies with a malformed error, which is fair enough.

So, I need to remember the first 5 or so lines (no problem) and then somehow insert these in the front of the file that parse is going to read? But I don't understand how ...

Thanks

Perhaps IO::Unread.

Cool module! Turns out it's just an interface to an existing PerlIO method, so it's very efficient. (In the unlikely case that your perl don't use PerlIO, slower tie is used as a fallback.)

Unfortunately, it doesn't build on Windows. From the error CPAN testers are getting, I'm guessing it's calling a function that's meant for internal use only. The developers of Perl have been able to restrict access to these functions on Window, but not on other systems (yet).

I'll see if I confirm this.

Thanks!

That is a good module indeed. Worked fine under Cygwin, which is where I need it.

Thanks to all who replied

Ah -- sorry, I didn't catch the issue about passing the pipe file handle to XML::Parser.

If the idea of using IO::Unread doesn't work out (though I expect it will do fine), there's also the possibility that you can use a script like the one I suggested, but instead of having two different subs in the dispatch table, you would have two different command lines -- one being your (separate) XML parser script invoked in a way to handle one type of stream, and the other(s) for handling the other type(s) of stream, and you just launch the right one as a subprocess:

my @holdem;
my %dispatch = (
    one => [ qw/my_parser --this_way/ ],
    two => [ qw/my_parser --that_way/ ], 
);
my $target;

open( $pipe, "-|", "some_xml_generator" );  # not "ls", obviously
while ( <$pipe> ) {
    if ( $target ) {
        print $target $_;
    }
    else {
        push @holdem, $_;
        my $decision = look_for_evidence( $_ );
        if ( $decision =~ /one|two/ ) {
            open( $target, "|-", @{$dispatch{$decision}} )
                or die "failed to launch: $dispatch{$decision}: $!\n";
            print $target $_ for ( @holdem );
        }
    }
}
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Your separate parser script uses the command line option to control how to set up event handlers for parsing.

(updated snippet to fix stupid mistakes, like forgetting to use a list for "command", "option" when opening the pipe to the parser script.)