in reply to Perl XPath

Your code affects two title nodes at once because your XPath expression matches two title nodes: 

/catalog/book/titles/title[ $i+1 ]

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You will need to either make your XPath expression match the specific book you are currently modifying:

/catalog/book[ $j ]/titles/title[ $i+1 ]

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... or you have to remove the text node from the current element and append your own text node. See XML::LibXML::Element->appendTextChild and XML::LibXML::Node->removeChildNodes:

my $element = ...;
$element->removeChildNodes();
$element->appendTextNode("Hello!");

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Re^2: Perl XPath
by GoForIt (Novice) on Feb 27, 2012 at 19:55 UTC

    Hi,

    Thanks for your response.

    Is there a way that I could pass a node to setNodeText()? I'm able to retrieve the different node values using getNodeText() method by passing the $node parameter. I'm assuming that I could do the same for setNodeText() method but somehow the method doesn't recognize the $node in XPath.

    Thanks

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      I assume once you have the XML::LibXML::Text node, you can use ->replaceData or ->setData to change the values. But I've never done anything like it using XML::LibXML, so you'll have to find out whether it works yourself.

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        The problem with that route is that it fails for elements with zero or more than one text child nodes. That may not be an issue here.
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        I used the below approach to replace the node value.

                       my $parent = $node->getParentNode();
              
                $parent->removeChild($node);
           
                my $element = XML::XPath::Node::Element->new('category
+');
                my $attr = XML::XPath::Node::Attribute->new($key, $val
+ue);
                $element->appendAttribute($attr);
    
             
                $result = $parent->appendChild($element);

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        It works fine but the execution time is long. I've about 1000 nodes to change and the script takes 40 minutes to finish.

        Is this a bad approach?

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