Stripping off the first line of file help!

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

Hi there Monks!
I am working on this XML file but my problem is that I need to find a way to strip off the first line on the XML file before using XML::XPATH to process it, because it is giving me an error, without this line it works:

encoding specified in XML declaration is incorrect at line 1, column 3
+0, byte 30:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
[download]

I have no choice but remove or ignore this line. Is there a way to tell XML::XPATH to ignore this first line

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
[download]

and start after that? If not, how would you approach this situation to get rid of this first line and process the rest of file?
Here is the code

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use XML::XPath;

      
my $xp = XML::XPath->new(filename => '/xml_test.xml');

foreach my $row ($xp->findnodes('/HOME/Account')) {

  my $nodeset = $row->find('Record');
  
  foreach my $node ( $nodeset->get_nodelist ) {
    
    my $account = $node->find( 'accnumber')->string_value;
    print "\n $account \n";
   
   }


}
[download]

Thnaks for looking!

Comment on Stripping off the first line of file help! Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Stripping off the first line of file help! by Sinistral (Monsignor) on Mar 02, 2011 at 14:41 UTC
If your data is really encoded in UTF-16, not UTF-8 and you have characters with a code point above 127, you're going to be in a world of hurt. I also want to point out that XML::XPath has had it's last update in 2003, and still has several outstanding bugs in it (I know, I did some fixes to overcome a couple in my own processing, and even that was years ago). For XPath processing, it is HIGHLY recommended to use XML::LibXML which handles all the character encodings properly so that you don't have to mangle your input XML. Here's a PerlMonks intro to get you started: Stepping up from XML::Simple to XML::LibXML	[reply]
Re: Stripping off the first line of file help! by roboticus (Chancellor) on Mar 02, 2011 at 14:40 UTC
Perhaps the better solution is to ask the provider to give you a correct XML file? If you get into the habit of trying to process incorrect XML files, it can lead you down a nasty rabbit hole. I generally give a bug report to the vendor and point them to an online XML validator so they can fix it. ...roboticus When your only tool is XML, all your problems are just beginning.	[reply]
Re: Stripping off the first line of file help! by fidesachates (Monk) on Mar 02, 2011 at 17:26 UTC
As my fellow monks have said, it's the module at fault here. I use XML::Simple	[reply]
Re: Stripping off the first line of file help! by anonymized user 468275 (Curate) on Mar 02, 2011 at 17:05 UTC
<? blah blah ?> is a standard XML header format. So it's the XML::XPATH module that is at fault. But the module will accept a scalar instead of a file of XML to process. So you could slurp the file into a variable and then: Because the header appears only once, a workaround substitution like: `s/\<\?.\?\>//;` [download] should be sufficient. I would tend not to remove the first line, because carriage control is just noise to XML and shouldn't be part of any parsing algorithm - even a simple parsing helper as in this case. One world, one people*	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Stripping off the first line of file help! by Anonymous Monk on Mar 03, 2011 at 16:11 UTC
OK, I can do this but how would I use XML::XPATH after slurping the file into a variable? Here is my situation: Its been treated as text, I rather treat the file like XML for validation. Any suggestions? `my @memberstocheck = ('12345', '88766', '887766', '009888', '111233', +'99877'); # Check XML file. my @xml = $zip->membersMatching( '.\.XML' ); foreach (@xml) { # Slurp file my $contents = $_->contents(); open my $contents_fh, '<', \$contents or die "Can't open scalar filehandle: $!"; my $first_line = <$contents_fh>; while (<$contents_fh>) { chomp; if(/<accnumber>(.?)<\/accnumber>/gi) { my $acc = $1; foreach (@memberstocheck) { if (/^($acc)/g) { print "$acc - ".$_."\n"; } } } } }` [download]	[reply] [d/l]