in reply to Stripping off the first line of file help!

<? 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/\<\?.*\?\>//;

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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

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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";
                  } 
              } 
         
          }
      
       }
   
    }

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