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

I'm sending XML packets based on database results. I need to escape characters which screw up XML such as & and so on. Is there a module I can use to safely do this for my variables? Thanks
  • Comment on XML - Escaping characters from database for XML

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: XML - Escaping characters from database for XML
by choroba (Cardinal) on May 28, 2012 at 12:32 UTC
    For example, XML::LibXML: 
    use strict;
use warnings;
use feature 'say';

use XML::LibXML;

my $xml = XML::LibXML->createDocument();
my $r   = $xml->createElement('root');
$xml->setDocumentElement($r);
$r->addChild($xml->createTextNode('<&'));
say $xml->toString;

    [download]
    Or its wrapper, XML::XSH2: 
    create root ;
insert text '<&' into /root ;
ls . ;

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

      With XML::LibXML, you can get away without creating a document and element...

      print XML::LibXML::Text->new('<&')->toString;

      [download]

      It's pretty easy to wrap that up into a function:

      sub escape_xml {
  XML::LibXML::Text->new(shift)->toString
}

print escape_xml('<&');

      [download]
      perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
        Well, yes. I was just discreetly suggesting creating the whole packages in XML::LibXML.
[reply]

Back to Seekers of Perl Wisdom