Question

I have a xml file for example,

<title> hello <name> hi </name> <street> id </street> this is xml file </title>

Here the parent node is title. I am going to extract the text inside the parent node removing the inner tags.

I have tried with the regex. But Is there any way other than using regex like, using some xml based functions to remove the tags. Note: the tag name is not known beforehand.

Hi I have tried this, I used the same xml

use XML::Simple; 
use Data::Dumper; 

my $simple = XML::Simple->new(); 
my $data = $simple->XMLin('XMLRemoval.xml'); 
my %oldHash = %$data; my %newHash = (); 

while ( my ($key, $innerRef) = each %oldHash ) 
{ 
    $newHash{$key} = @$innerRef[1]; 
} 

foreach $key ( keys %newHash ) 
{ 
    print $newHash{$key}; 
}

And I am getting the error : Can’t use string (” id “) as an ARRAY ref while “strict refs”

Answer 1

Based on your requirement, you can try this.
I have used the file provided by you in example.

we are here defining the root key contents in XML(or renaming it), you need to choose a key which will not be in your XML( i have choose root-contents).

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use XML::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;
my $key;
my $simple = XML::Simple->new();
my $data = $simple->XMLin('XMLRemoval.xml', 'ContentKey' => 'root-contents');
print Dumper $data;
my $val = $data->{'root-contents'};
if(ref($val) =~ /Array/i)
{
    foreach (@$val)
    {
        print "$_\n";
    }
}
else
{
    print "$val\n";
}

Please go though the XML::Simple documentation, there are lot of options to tweak per your requirement.

I will leave the debug part to you for your code to check what was the error and how can solve it(which is explanatory itself) :).