Question

I need to add a few lines in an XML file at a particular node, in Perl. So, I need to search for a particular node and then add those lines. Which parser would you recommend for this?

Answer 1

I recommend XML::Twig. It can modify all elements of a certain name, or just one element. It has excellent documentation, including a tutorial… and the module author is always on-call 🙂

This is a simple example which will append some text to all elements named “article”:

use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::Twig;

my $xmlStr = <<XML;
<foo>
    <article>ME ME ME</article>
    <article>HE HE</article>
    <particle>ME TOO</particle>
</foo>
XML

my $twig= XML::Twig->new(
    twig_handlers => { article => \&article }
);
$twig->parse($xmlStr);
$twig->print();
print "\n";
exit;

sub article {
    my ($twig, $art) = @_;
    my $stuff = $art->text();  # get the text of article
    $stuff .= ' YOU YOU YOU';
    $art->set_text($stuff);
}