vparikh:

It works just fine for me. Perhaps you're doing someting to disturb your hash before you try to print it?

$ cat t.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $VAR1;

$VAR1 = {
          'Data1' => {
                     'Data2' => {
                               'DATE' => '2000-10-19',
                               'ID' => 'A95',
                               'STATUS' => 'A',
                               'TIME' => {},
                             },
                     'TIMESTAMP' => '2012-08-04T20:15:04.506-04:00'
                   }
        };

print $VAR1->{Data1}{Data2}{DATE}, ".\n";
print $VAR1->{Data1}->{Data2}->{DATE}, ".\n";

$ perl t.pl
2000-10-19.
2000-10-19.
[download]

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

Thank you for your quick reply. But I am not able to access $var1 as a variable since it is not really in my script. My original script is this:

use XML::Simple; # qw(:strict);
use Data::Dumper;

my $simple = XML::Simple->new();
my $config = $simple->XMLin('/home/parse3.xml');

print $config;

print $config->{Data1}->{Data2}->{DATE}, ".\n";
[download]

Before I was using Data dumper, so it would dump it all out as $VAR1. So my question is how do I access the date field with or without data dumper? Thanks again. I really appreciate your help!

Since you didn't provide your actual XML, I had to dummy some up based on the dump you provided.

<root>
    <Data1>
        <TIMESTAMP>2012-08-04T20:15:04.506-04:00</TIMESTAMP>
        <Data2>
            <DATE>2000-10-19</DATE>
            <ID>A95</ID>
            <STATUS>A</STATUS>
            <TIME></TIME>
        </Data2>
    </Data1>
</root>
[download]

Using a slightly modified version of your script, I'm able to print the date.

use strict;
use warnings;

use XML::Simple; # qw(:strict);
use Data::Dumper;

my $simple = XML::Simple->new();
my $config = $simple->XMLin('parse3.xml'); # /home/parse3.xml isn't va
+lid on my system

#print Dumper( $config ); # Uncomment to get a dump of the data struct
+ure

print $config->{Data1}->{Data2}->{DATE}, ".\n";

__END__
Output:
2000-10-19.
[download]

vparikh:

The same way, just use your variable name ($config) instead of $VAR1 in your code. I used $VAR1 because I just used the data structure from your post and wanted to minimize changes so you could see how to do it.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.