Question

I have a Perl script that reads a XML file that doesn’t have content, only attributes in the element.

Like this:

<league>
<game name="bla"/>
</league>

Now I try to get the game attribute ‘name’.

I tried using $xml->{league}->{game}->{name} and $xml->{league}->{game}->['name'] but they are both not working. Something about a hash problem.

Is there anybody who can help me get the value?

Answer 1

Well, from the XML you posted, I get this:

Entity: line 3: parser error : Opening and ending tag mismatch: league line 0 and leage

It doesn’t even appear to be a strict/warnings issue because it appears when I comment my USUW out.

But if you have the right tags, this should work:

$xml->{game}{name};

And if I call XMLin with KeepRoot => 1, you’ll find it at:

    $xml->{league}{game}{name};

If you are having trouble locating how the data is being read in, do this:

use 5.010;
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
use XML::Simple;

my $xml = XMLin( $input );
say Data::Dumper->Dump( [ $xml ], [ '$xml' ] );

And then use the path to the structures presented.

---

Note:

$xml->{league}->{game}->['name'];

should have died with: “Not an ARRAY reference at” even without warnings enabled. ['string'] is a reference to an array with the string 'string' as the sole element. And, if $xml->{league}{game} were an array, it would have died with a non-numeric error, because strings don’t address arrays.