NAME

XML::SimpleObject - Perl extension allowing a simple object representation of a parsed XML::Parser tree.

SYNOPSIS

use XML::SimpleObject;

DESCRIPTION

This is a short and simple class allowing simple object access to a parsed XML::Parser tree, with methods for fetching children and attributes in as clean a manner as possible.

USAGE

$xmlobj = new XML::SimpleObject($parser->parse($XML))

$parser is an XML::Parser object created with Style "Tree":

my $parser = new XML::Parser (ErrorContext => 2, Style => "Tree");

After creating $xmlobj, this object can now be used to browse the XML tree with the following methods.

$xmlobj->child("NAME")

This will return a new XML::SimpleObject object using the child element NAME.

$xmlobj->children("NAME")

This will return an array of XML::SimpleObject objects of element NAME. Thus, if $xmlobj represents the top-level XML element, 'children' will return an array of all elements directly below the top-level that have the element name NAME.

$xmlobj->value

If the element represented by $xmlobj contains any CDATA, this method will return that text data.

$xmlobj->attribute("NAME")

This returns the text for an attribute NAME of the XML element represented by $xmlobj.

$xmlobj->attributes

This returns a hash of key/value pairs for all elements in element $xmlobj.

EXAMPLES

Given this parsed XML document:

<files>
  <file type="symlink">
    <name>/etc/dosemu.conf</name>
    <dest>dosemu.conf-drdos703.eval</dest>
  </file>
  <file>
    <name>/etc/passwd</name>
    <bytes>948</bytes>
  </file>
</files>

You can then interpret the tree as follows:

my $parser = new XML::Parser (ErrorContext => 2, Style => "Tree");
my $xmlobj = new XML::SimpleObject ($parser->parse($XML));

print "Files: \n";
foreach my $element ($xmlobj->child("files")->children("file"))
{
  print "  filename: " . $element->child("name")->value . "\n";
  if ($element->attribute("type"))
  {
    print "    type: " . $element->attribute("type") . "\n";
  }
  print "    bytes: " . $element->child("bytes")->value . "\n";
}  

This will output:

Files:
  filename: /etc/dosemu.conf
    type: symlink
    bytes: 20
  filename: /etc/passwd
    bytes: 948

AUTHOR

Dan Brian <dbrian@brians.org>

SEE ALSO

perl(1), XML::Parser.