Some Utility Functions I Wrote Above XML::LibXML

Hi all!

Recently, I had to clean up an XHTML page from en.wikibooks.org . The page was 
valid XHTML 1.0 transitional, but was quite convulted (as most MediaWiki pages 
are) and so needed cleaning up so I can integrate it into my homepage. Since 
it was valid XHTML, I decided to use XML::LibXML.

In the process of writing it I wrote a few utility functions, and I've been 
wondering what to do with them. Possible options are:

1. Release as a separate module on CPAN.

2. Add to XML::LibXML as Perl-based methods.

3. Add to XML::LibXML as XS methods.

4. Add to libxml2 and then implement XML::LibXML bindings.

5. Do nothing with them and just keep them to myself.

You can find the full code here:

https://opensvn.csie.org/shlomif/homepage/trunk/bin/cleanup-mediawiki-html.pl

What I wrote reminds me of the beginning of a really lame jQuery/etc. 
replacement only for XML. However http://search.cpan.org/dist/pQuery/ is 
incomplete and HTML only, and does not support XML.

Anyway, here are the functions that I wrote:

<<<<<<<<<<<
sub remove
{
    my $node = shift;

    my $parent = $node->parentNode;

    $parent->removeChild($node);

    return;
}
>>>>>>>>>>>

Prunes a node from the XML tree, without knowing its parent in advance.

<<<<<<<<<<
sub empty
{
    my $node = shift;

    $node->removeChildNodes();

    return $node;
}
>>>>>>>>>>

OK, this is pretty silly, but I thought it was not so trivial, so I ended up 
writing it, and then re-implementing it proprely..

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

sub stringify
{
    my $list = shift;

    return 
    [
        map { (ref($_) eq "") ? XML::LibXML::Text->new($_) : $_ } @$list
    ];
}

sub replace
{
    my $node = shift;
    my $childs = shift;

    empty($node);

    foreach my $c (@{
            stringify((ref($childs) eq "ARRAY") ? $childs : [$childs])
        }
    )
    {
        $node->appendChild($c);
    }

    return $node;
}
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Here, I replace a node with new child nodes.

Finally, there's also some pretty-complex code to remove all elements from a 
document that come after a certain chosen element. It was not extracted into a 
function yet (since I only used it once), but it would be possible.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
What Makes Software Apps High Quality -  http://xrl.us/bkeuk

God gave us two eyes and ten fingers so we will type five times as much as we
read.

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