tobias_hofer has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello Monks

I got this following problem:
I got a hash which I want to get into xml. My problem is that the content (keys) of the hash are ordered alphabetically. Thus the content comes into a different order to file. This is not a problem to xml itself but a problem for the tool-chain following my perl script, which expects things to be in a specific order

My hash is generated and looks in the end like this 
 my $TGROUP = { 
     COLS    => 4,
     COLSPEC => [... Array of hashes...],
     TBODY   => HASH(0x8b...),
     THEAD   => HASH(0x8bc...)
}

[download]
and it comes it this order to xml 
<TRGROUP...
  <COLS ...
  <COLSPEC ..
  <TBODY ....
  <THEAD ...
>

[download]
but the tool requires it in a different order: 
<TRGROUP...
  <COLS ...
  <COLSPEC ..
  <THEAD ....
  <TBODY ...
>

[download]
Therefore it would be simplest to reorder the sequence of keys in the hash.. i.e. like that: 
 my $TGROUP = { 
     COLS    => 4,
     COLSPEC => [... Array of hashes...],
     THEAD   => HASH(0x8b...),
     TBODY   => HASH(0x8bc...)
}

[download]
Is this somehow possible to do? I tried to create the hash once more in a different order but this does not work.

Any help is highly welcome!

best regards!
Tobias

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: xml using XML::Simple reording of XML-Content
by hdb (Monsignor) on Jun 17, 2013 at 11:53 UTC

    In this post there was good advice: Re^2: XML::Simple how do i keep the same xml format (Values and Attributs)?

    UPDATE: Only way I see is to create 4 XML files for the second level in your tree according to the desired order, and then manually create the outer structure around them. For example: 

    use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::Simple;
my $TGROUP = { 
     COLS    => 4,
     COLSPEC => [ 1, 2, 3, 4 ],
     THEAD   => { head => "head" },
     TBODY   => { body => "body" },
};
print "<TABLE>\n";
for ( qw( COLS COLSPEC THEAD TBODY ) ) { # in your desired order
     print XMLout( {$_ => $TGROUP->{$_}}, RootName => $_, KeepRoot => 
+1, NoATTR => 1 );
}
print "</TABLE>\n";

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
Re: xml using XML::Simple reording of XML-Content
by Anonymous Monk on Jun 17, 2013 at 11:53 UTC
[reply]
[d/l]
Re: xml using XML::Simple reording of XML-Content
by poj (Abbot) on Jun 17, 2013 at 15:27 UTC
    Any help is highly welcome!

    I'm no expert in this subject but here's a XSLT transform from the original XML into one with the correct order

    #!perl
use strict;
use XML::LibXSLT;
use XML::LibXML;

=head1 test.xsl
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Tr
+ansform">
  <xsl:output indent="yes"/>
  <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

  <xsl:template match="node()|@*">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="TRGROUP">
      <xsl:copy>
        <xsl:apply-templates select="COLS"/>
        <xsl:apply-templates select="COLSPEC"/>
        <xsl:apply-templates select="THEAD"/>
        <xsl:apply-templates select="TBODY"/>
      </xsl:copy>      
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
=cut

my $parser = XML::LibXML->new();
my $xslt   = XML::LibXSLT->new();
my $stylesheet = $xslt->parse_stylesheet_file('test.xsl');

my $xml;
{
  local $/='';
  $xml = <DATA>;
}

my $source_doc = $parser->parse_string( $xml );
my $result = $stylesheet->transform( $source_doc );
print $stylesheet->output_string( $result );


__DATA__
<TABLE>
<TRGROUP>
  <COLS>AA</COLS>
  <TBODY>A</TBODY>
  <COLSPEC>XX</COLSPEC>
  <THEAD>1</THEAD>
</TRGROUP>
<TRGROUP>
  <COLSPEC>XX</COLSPEC>
  <TBODY>B</TBODY>
  <THEAD>2</THEAD>
  <COLS>BB</COLS>
</TRGROUP>
<TRGROUP>
  <TBODY>C</TBODY>
  <COLS>CC</COLS>
  <COLSPEC>ZZ</COLSPEC>
  <THEAD>3</THEAD>
</TRGROUP>
</TABLE>

    [download]
    poj
[reply]
[d/l]
Re: xml using XML::Simple reording of XML-Content
by tobias_hofer (Friar) on Jun 17, 2013 at 13:20 UTC
    Thanks a lot!
    I will switch to XMLLib!!

    Best regards!

    Tobias
[reply]

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