Item Description: A CGI.pm-like module to write XML

Review Synopsis: Robust and convenient, recommended over print

Description

XML::Writer generates XML using an interface similar to CGI.pm. It allows various checks to be performed on the document and takes care of special caracter encoding.

Why use XML::Writer?

• you are generating XML documents "from scratch"
• you are used to CGI.pm
• XML::Writer is quite mature

Why NOT use XML::Writer?

• another method is more appropriate
• you don't like CGI.pm!

Related modules

XML::ValidWriter and XML::AutoWriter both aim at emulating XML::Writer interface:

• XML::ValidWriter performs some checks on the output document. Notably it checks whether the elements and attributes are declared in the DTD and whether you are closing the appropriate element.
• XML::AutoWriter automatically generates missing start or end tags, based on the DTD.

XML::Generator and XML::Handler::YAWriter are 2 other modules doing XML generation

Personal notes

At the moment XML::Writer seems to be the most mature and efficient module to generate XML. Of course a lot of the transformation modules such as XML::Simple, XML::DOM and XML::Twig can also be used;

Of course plain print's can also be used, but I think that XML::Writer is a lot more convenient and adds some control over the generated XML.

Example

#!/bin/perl -w

 use strict;
 use XML::Writer;
 use IO;

 my $doc = new IO::File(">doc.xml");
 my $writer = new XML::Writer(OUTPUT => $doc);

 $writer->startTag("doc", class => "simple");           # tag + att
  $writer->dataElement( 'title', "Simple XML Document");# text elt
  $writer->startTag( "section");
   $writer->dataElement( 'title', "Introduction",      
                         no => 1, type => "intro");
   $writer->startTag( "para");
    $writer->characters( "a text with");
    $writer->dataElement( 'bold', "bold");
    $writer->characters( " words.");
   $writer->endTag( "para");
  $writer->endTag();                        # close section      
 $writer->endTag();                         # close doc
 $writer->end();                            # check that the doc
                                            # has only one element
 $doc->close(); # fixed (was $output->close(); ) as suggested by the p
+ost below
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