Re: Final questions with Xerces Perl

"Stephen Christensen" <[email protected]> writes:

> Thanks for your help on my last question about Xerces Perl.  I was
> able to get a great sample someone on the mailing list that really
> helped me figure out how to use Xerces.

Cool - lists are a great help.

> First, I have some elements that look like this:
> <value name="foo">
> 
> I am currently calling $element->getNodeName(), which works great, and
> returns the string "value".  However, I cannot figure out how to
> return the [  name="foo"  ] part of the element.  

 my $name = $element->getAttribute('name');

> My understanding is that this is the attribute of the node... but is
> that correct? And if so, how do I retrieve that string?
> getAttributes returns a DOMNamedNodeMap, so that isn't correct,
> right?

See the README, section 8.3)

      	# returns a reference to a XML::Xerces::DOM_NamedNodeMap
      	my $attr_map_ref = $element_node->getAttributes();
      
      	# returns a hash of the attributes
      	my %attrs = $element_node->getAttributes();
      
put the method in scalar context and you get an object, put it in list
context and you get a Perl hash - I prefer the Perl hash.

> Secondly, the XML I am parsing has a lot of linebreaks in it.  When
> I try to parse it, it attempts to read those linebreaks as elements.
> Is there a way to removewhitespace, or something of that nature?

Two answers:

1) $node->getNodeType eq $XML::Xerces::DOMNode::ELEMENT_NODE;

   filter on the node type and throw away text nodes

2) if your XML file has a DTD you can can set a parser attribute to
   ignore optional whitespace:

     my $parser = XML::Xerces::AbstractDOMParser->new();
     $parser->setIncludeIgnorableWhitespace(0);

   now you will not get the newlines, but this only works if your XML
   files use a DTD.

Cheers,
jas.