Parsing XML

A Little Help Required

[StanTheMan]

Can any one tell me how to get parse data out of a XML document and store them in variables?

I understand this is basic but I am a basic kinda guy!

Thanks

[moltar]

Have a look at XML::Simple [search.cpan.org]. It may look very complex at first, but in reality it's very simple.

It does not come with Perl by default. You need to install it yourself.

[wruppert]

Here is the essence of a routine I recently wrote to access a certain web service. Details have been obscured.

Note the eval. XMLin dies if the parse fails - the eval protects against that.

You can use Data::Dumper to see the details of the hash of hashes the XML is parsed into as a guide to figuring out how to get at it.

I had my own "get" subroutine in my code, so I had to avoid importing the "get" routine in LWP::Simple.

My real code returned undef instead of croaking.

[pre]
  use strict;
  use warnings;
  use Carp;
  use LWP::Simple qw(!get);
  use XML::Simple;
  use Data::Dumper;
  
  my $debug = 1;
  
  my $url = 
    "http://engine.exampleapi.com/api.xml" .
    "?application=sample_ap" .
    "&key1=" . $key1_value .
    "&key2=" . $key2_value;
  
  my $xml = LWP::Simple::get($url);
  croak "get $url failed" unless $xml;
  
  my $results = eval{XMLin($xml)};
  if($@) {
    croak "XML Parse failed: $@\n";
  }
  
  if ($debug) {
    print "\nget XML Parse:\n";
    print Dumper($results), "---------------\n";
  }
  
  print $results->{foo1}->{bar1}, "\n";
  print $results->{foo1}->{bar2}, "\n";
  print $results->{foo2}->{bar1}, "\n";
  print $results->{foo2}->{bar2}, "\n";
[/pre]