As I have posted before, I help maintain a set of Perl scripts which use XML::Twig to run validation checks on dictionary entries written in XML. The checks are looking for things that a DTD would not spot.

In Node XML::Twig prev_sibling I asked for help with a piece of code which decided whether a sense in the entry was to be considered rare or not.

Now I have a further problem relating to this issue: there is another piece of text which might mean that something labelled "rare" in an la element is actually not rare:
<la>rare</la> before the 20th century.
<la>rare</la> after the 18th century.
In both these cases, for checking purposes the sense or entry should be treated as "not rare"

The piece of code I posted in the previous question I have been able to modify to handle this as it is handling the parent element of the <la> element. This code is called at the sense level within the XML.

Howevere there is other fairly similar code to handle things for the entry as a whole:

sub la_obs_handler {
    my ($t,$elt) = @_;
    my $la = $elt->text;
    
    my $isNow = 0;
    if (
        ($prev && $prev->text =~ m/[nN]ow $/)
        || $elt->parent->text =~ m/[nN]ow .* and rare/
        || $elt->parent->text =~ m/rare after/
        || $elt->parent->text =~ m/rare before/
        ) {
        $isNow = 1;
    }
 if (
         $la eq "rare"
         && ! $isNow 
         ) {
        $is_entry_rare = 1;
        }
}
[download]

This should set the variable $is_entry_rare to 1 if the <la> element being handled contains the text "rare" but not if it is also preceded by "Now" or "Now <something> and". This works. However it should also not set the varaibale to 1 if the la element is followed by sibling text saying "after ...." of "before ...." I have tried testing the parent node's text content as shown in my code but it does not seem to work - I think this is because XML::Twig has not accessed anything following the <la> element since it is handling that element.

Is there any way of getting at the text following the <la> element? I know I could do this by handling the parent element instead but I don't think that is an option with my legacy code. Are any other solutuions possible?

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