Question

I am new to XPath and would like to know how to extract values in an XML document.

I have an XML:

<root>
<element1 attrib1 = value1 attrib2 = value2 >
<element2 attrib1 = value1 attrib2 = value2 >
<element3 attrib1 = value1 attrib2 = value2 >
</root>

What I want to do is extract all attrib=value pairs alongwith the element name.
Eg:
element1 attrib1 value1
element2 attrib2 value2
.
.
element3 attrib2 value2

I have tried using the '//@*' XPath query, which return attrib=value, not the elt name.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use '*/*' to find all elements at the 2nd level.

my $xp = XML::XPath->new( ioref => \*DATA );

# select the element nodes without having to specify their names
my @element_nodes = $xp->findnodes('*/*'); 

foreach my $element (@element_nodes) {
    # see https://metacpan.org/module/XML::XPath::Node::Element
    print $element->getName;
    foreach my $attribute ($element->getAttributes) {
        # see https://metacpan.org/module/XML::XPath::Node::Attribute
        print ' '.$attribute->getName.' '.$attribute->getData;
    }
    print "\n";
}

__DATA__
<root>
<element1 attrib1="value1" attrib2="value2" />
<element2 attrib1="value1" attrib2="value2" />
<element3 attrib1="value1" attrib2="value2" />
</root>