As for claiming you can't compile expat on AIX, Solaris, and Linux ... most (if not all) of those OSes come with expat already installed. (Not so sure about AIX, but Solaris and Linux usually do.) So, it's just a matter of installing XML::Parser (which will be a problem only on AIX because of the need to install gcc as well - don't trust IBM's C compiler - it sucks).

Oh - as an unrelated note - are you planning on making sure you have the right compilation of Perl on each of these boxes? AIX boxes sometime come pre-installed with Perl4. Solaris boxes usually come pre-installed with Perl5.6.0, which is buggy. RedHat comes installed with a Perl5.8.0 that has threading compiled in, which is a performance hit if you don't need it.

In other words - you will want to compile your own Perl for each of these setups.

RedHat and perl 5.8.0 can also have unicode bugs - potientially in issue with xml parsing

The only one I know about is XML::SAX::PurePerl. I haven't used it, though, so I can't say anything about it.

I haven't used either of them, though. Maybe the Perl-XML mailing list is a good place to look and ask.

XML::Mini provides very simple mapping between hashes and XML, this dramatically reduces amount of XML-related code in your app ( at least my experiences suggests so - this makes my code wrangle only with logic, and xml-parsing and generating takes only few lines )

Another thing I found, that is not based on Expat is LibXML, it seems that it's got cleaner interface then most other XML libs outthere, and claims to work way better with 'modern' stuff like XPath etc..

But getting back to XML::Mini, I like it very much, but may not fit all uses ( it doesen't do any DTD validation nor any other funky stuff )

         use XML::Mini::Document;
         my $xmlDoc = XML::Mini::Document->new();
         $xmlDoc->parse($string);
         my $xmlHash = $xmlDoc->toHash();
         my $c = $xmlHash->{'container'};
         my $body = $c->{'body'};
[download]

The perl-only XML parsers I have looked at are:

• XML::SAX::PurePerl, included in XML::SAX, which can be used by all the SAX based modules, including XML::Simple. It works reasonably well, but will not process external entities.
• XML::Parser::Lite, included in SOAP::Lite, which emulates the XML::Parser interface. It only parses the subset of XML used by SOAP though (eg no DTD)
• XML::Stream::Parser, included in XML::Stream, which only parses the subset of XML used in Jabber messages.

As you see none of them is a complete XML parser, so you might want to check if they work for the kind of XML you have to deal with (and for the kind of XML that you might have to deal with in the future!).

2 other comments: some of the XML modules are based on libxml2 instead of expat (XML::LibXML for example). And I don't know about AIX, but at least for Solaris you can get expat as a pre-compiled package.

For AIX, you can go here, or sometimes there

---------------------------
Dr. Mark Ceulemans
Senior Consultant
BMC, Belgium

You don't want a perl-only XML parser. Programs parsing XML are slow enough as is. It would be unbearably slow with a perl-only parser. (I once tried parsing XML with rexml, an xml parser implemented in pure ruby. It was SLOW.)