Question

I am using the following script:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -wT

use strict;
use warnings;

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "xml reader";

# use module
use XML::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;

#print Dumper (XML::Simple->new()->XMLin());

and it will read in my xml file called xml.xml

If I now move the xml file out of my cgi-bin, change its name and reference it using:

#print Dumper (XML::Simple->new()->XMLin("../resource.xml"));

It still works.

If I now try and use a url instead the script doesn’t return anything:

print Dumper (XML::Simple->new()->XMLin("http://digitalessence.net/resource.xml"));

I have tried with and without the http://, without the www and all sorts of different ways of doing this but it doesn’t return anything.

Have I done something silly here or will it just not load a remote url?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The XMLin() method in XML::Simple does not support fetching the XML from an URL. You would need to fetch the XML separately, either to a file or directly into a Perl scalar variable, before applying XMLin(). This is clear from the XML::Simple documentation.