Question

Does anybody know a Perl library that can parse XML documents and enables me to select nodes via CSS Selectors and namespace support?

Background:
I was trying to parse a document with a default namespace with the perl libxml package but it never returned anything until I removed the default namespace from the root node.

This is what I found on the topic:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2003-April/msg00143.html

So a simple example would be a file like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<root xmlns="http://example.com/ns">
  <message>Hi</message>
</root

XPath //message wouldn’t give me any results with perl libxml. I know that the library is doing it’s job perfectly fine but I still need to parse that stuff, so I figured a CSS selector based library might be more successful.

Answer 1

This should work with anything you can throw at libxml.

use strictures;
use HTML::TreeBuilder::LibXML qw();
BEGIN { HTML::TreeBuilder::LibXML->replace_original; }
use Web::Query qw();

print Web::Query->new_from_html(<<'MARKUP')->find('root > message')->text;
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<root xmlns="http://example.com/ns">
<message>Hi</message>
</root>
MARKUP

1;