it's about a (perceived) lack of effort

I guess that's my point. We know about CPAN and how to search it. Does he? Is the perceived lack of effort really a lack of effort, or the fact that we know about CPAN and we are looking at it that way?

I agree the question was worded badly. But couldn't his 'help' request mean 'Can you show where I can find this out?'. Can't we give the benefit of the doubt?

As a test I googled 'perl sort XML' and this was the first link. I think we can all agree that it is not the least bit helpful.

We know about CPAN and how to search it. Does he?

Yes, I'm sure he knows how to use a search engine. Google searches CPAN and PerlMonks.

As a test I googled 'perl sort XML' and this was the first link.

You seriously only expect 5s of effort?

No, I don't expect 5 seconds of effort. But that may not be the only factor. A new perl user reading that 1st link from google would be completely confused.

I guess my post is coming off a little too 'Kum Ba Yah'. It's not meant that way. It's meant to self-evaluation and self-service. If we keep smacking down real new interest in perl then where will we be? Is what we are perceiving in the OP real laziness? or is it frustration? I don't know (in this case) to a good degree of certainty. So I say default to, thinking these new users are frustrated and take the opportunity expand perl's user base.

grep
One dead unjugged rabbit fish later...

I looked at the node and was all ready to pull out my crayon (they won't give me sharp objects like pencils) to write the usual diatribe about not hand parsing mark up, when I realised that nowhere had the op alluded to XML. Indeed he calls it a 'text' file. I then noted the other replies which provided enough information to get the OP up and going, at least to the point of discovering it is XML and that XML can be nasty. I guess with a little encouragement he may come back at that point and ask a better question.

I am a little late to the party here, and as a fairly new perl programmer myself, there have been a lot of times where after reading the documentation for a given perl module I have had to do pretty exhaustive searches to find anything that gave me even a beginning of a clue as to how to do something.

Oftentimes this is because the docs are written for people that are more familiar with perl than I am, or there is a very simple example and it can do "all these other things" but they seem to have no good docs. Why that is, I dunno, it could be that I just don't know what I am looking for, or where to look.

My reason for replying is that there are many things that I am learning on my own, but I often see that I have written some chunk of code and after looking at it I think "Damn, there must be a far better way to do that. I don't particularly want someone to write the code for me, but I wonder sometimes if it would be better if someone that was far better with perl than I took the time to provide the code and then subsequently explain it.

I have found some code snippets on the web that do what I need, and they are very short which is nice other than, while I understand that it works for what I am using it for, I would rather see the 10 lines of code that were smashed down into that fancy one-liner I am now using and I would like to see them explained and a what,why,where,when,how given about why the one-liner works and how it all relates, so some theory I guess.

Just my $.02, but I think examples by experienced folks come in handy. On top of that, the more examples I see or are available, the less questions I generally need to ask :)

Right now I am questioning what I wrote because I am pretty sure that was long-winded and didn't actually cover what I wanted to, but my brain hurts, so I am not bothering to edit it or anything. Deal :)