Extracting regexps from the text of an element and tagging them is done using the mark method (in XML::Twig 3.00):

[Janitorial Note: In the following code, read XCODE as CODE. The original was messing up our <CODE> tags on certain browsers. --f ]

#!/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use XML::Twig;
my $t= XML::Twig->new;
$t->parse( \*DATA);

# tag all matching strings with <a class="xcode">$1</xcode>
# returns the list of newly created elements
my @xref=$t->root->mark( qr/(@\w+)/, 'a', { class => 'xcode'});
foreach my $xref ( @xref)
  { $xref->set_content(  substr( $xref->text, 1) );  # remove the lead
+ing @
    $xref->set_att(  href => $xref->text . ".html");
  }
$t->print;

__DATA__

<doc>text with a @reference to whichever @document I want</doc>
[download]

Actually I have a bunch of methods like this one, which are seldom used and hard to find in the docs and I was thinking of splitting them into a different module, XML::Twig::Utils or something similar. It would include the existing matk, split (similar to mark but returns a dufferent set f elements), and proably some more, plus methods that I use for conversions to XML, like merge, and break, and several others. Would this make sense?

Edit by footpad, Tue Nov 6 04:50:35 2001 (GMT).