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in reply to Re^4: Why oh why is working with XML so bloomin' difficult in Perl?
in thread Modified title: The structures created by many of the XML parsers in Perl appear unnecessarily deep in levels...

The reason that the "memory structures (are created) in a generic way" is because it's parsing generic data. You will never find a bit of code on this planet that will ever take your totally unknown XML and turn it into a non-generic data structure. The only way it could be possible is if you provide a schema of some sort or write your own parser (or subclass one).

What I gather from your comments is that your data being parsed isn't something you generated yourself, but something some other app out there generated. Can you give an example of the data that you're parsing? It might help to give you a pointer in the right direction.


While I ask a lot of Win32 questions, I hate Windows with a passion. That's the problem with writing a cross-platform program. I'm a Linux user myself. I wish more people were.
If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so.
- Richard Dawkins
  • Comment on Re^5: Why oh why is working with XML so bloomin' difficult in Perl?

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Re^6: Why oh why is working with XML so bloomin' difficult in Perl?
by jfroebe (Parson) on Jan 22, 2009 at 01:22 UTC

    Agreed. I should have put in a "I'm venting here" message to take the bite off.

    Most of the XML data I'm dealing with is internal XML at work (sometimes I receive a dtd but sometimes I receive nothing more than raw output). I'm using different parsers depending on what I'm receiving and what I'm doing with it.

    XML::Simple is going to be fine for simple web services like Flickr REST though.

    Jason L. Froebe

    Blog, Tech Blog