Hi :D

After days of messing around with perl mods, trying to get them to work...

It is easier/more important to resolve this issue of installing mods, monk, see Tutorials:A Guide To Installing Modules, installing modules non-interactively, in your home directory

I gave up and am trying to code it myself as it seems simple enough to parse this EXAMPLE DATA

Thats not valid xml, friend /*Mwahaha*

(XML:Simple simply won't work on my host and I don't have access to add other mods) ...

Sir, Yes, even you can use CPAN

I'm looking to create this example from LUA, unless theres an easier way to do this of course

And we should know lua syntax? Boy howdy

Well, it looks close enough to this format, so you can use one of those solutions :D

I'm trying to build an array from the table data above by reading line by line and creating the appropriate array tree

Ok dawg, here you go, magic, Data::Lua - Parse variables out of Lua code.

update: Sorry cat, too much magic, its kinda hard to install, needs Inline::Lua

I'm sure its easy for you all, but not me Thank-you *bow*

Yeah, copy/paste can be easier if you can grok how to use it, see Re^2: parsing XML fragments (xml log files) with... a regex

XML::Simple is easier

#!/usr/bin/perl --
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
use XML::Simple;
my $lua =<<'__LUA__';
<GeocodeResponse>
    <status>OK</status>
    <result>
        <type>street_address</type>
        <formatted_address>1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy</formatted_address>
        <address_component>
            <long_name>1600</long_name>
            <short_name>1600</short_name>
            <type>street_number</type>
            </address_component>
    </result>
</GeocodeResponse>
__LUA__

print Dumper( XMLin($lua, ) ), "\n\n";
__END__
$VAR1 = {
          'status' => 'OK',
          'result' => {
                        'formatted_address' => '1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy
+',
                        'type' => 'street_address',
                        'address_component' => {
                                                 'short_name' => '1600
+',
                                                 'long_name' => '1600'
+,
                                                 'type' => 'street_num
+ber'
                                               }
                      }
        };
[download]

Don't feel jealous :D

Thank-you for the reply, i'll read what you've written a couple times to decipher the code XML:Simple is easier for sure, but... sadly it only works on my own computer, not the target server. I've two hosts, both of which allow 'some' perl functions, but neither supplying all. Highly frusterating to make a bunch of 'working on my server code', then upload and only portions of it work on each host because of missing mods etc >.> Back to parsing your meanings :) *bow*

Your XML appears to be incomplete, hence unparseable by any decent XML parser.

The code below uses a few regexes operation over the entire string. Note this will only work if your XML is spread across several lines as shown in the snippet you provided.

use strict;

# Load up your XML
# This example ignores the obviously mangled <?xml ?> line at the top

my $xml = qq(
<GeocodeResponse>
    <status>OK</status>
    <result>
        <type>street_address</type>
        <formatted_address>1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy</formatted_address>
        <address_component>
            <long_name>1600</long_name>
            <short_name>1600</short_name>
            <type>street_number</type>
            </address_component>
);

# Before
print "Before the transformation: \n";
print "$xml\n";

# Regexes to re-write the text

# replace all closing tags, which must run to the end of the line
$xml =~ s[</.+$][",]mg;
# rewrite opening tags in as hash keys - first part
$xml =~ s[<]["]mg;
# concluding part of rewriting opening tags
$xml =~ s[>][" => "]mg;
# handle elements that contain non-text elements
$xml =~ s[=> "$][=> {]mg;
# the final closing tag is surplus, remove it
$xml =~ s[^\s+",\s+$][]mg;

# find out how many opening braces are in the string
my $count = split /{/, $xml;
# close all the hashes
$xml .= " } " x $count;

# complete the transformation with the var declaration and the top-lev
+el opening brace
my $var = "\$mytable = { " . $xml;

# After
print "After the transformation: \n";
print "$var\n";

# define the lexical that our transformed text will be eval'ed into
my $mytable;
eval $var;

# choke if an error occurs in the eval
die "ERROR: ", $@, "\n" if $@;

# load Data::Dumper to examine the resulting data structure
use Data::Dumper qw(Dumper);

# the whole hash of hashes (and plain text values)
print "\nThe whole object:\n";
print Dumper $mytable;

# an example of a nested object
print "\nThe Geocode -> result -> address_component object:\n";
print Dumper $$mytable{"GeocodeResponse"}{"result"}{"address_component
+"};
[download]

"This example ignores the obviously mangled <?xml ?> line at the top

I lol'd so hard reading that statement :) It was only an example to show the data format, but I failed on that line completely. Thank-you, reading your reply further as well