Question

I try to parse an xml document using XML::Simple perl parsing.
I noticed, if the document looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<fields>
  <field>
    <f1>1234</f1>
    <name>MyName1</name>
  </field>
</fields>

the result of print(Dumper($ref)); looks as expected:

$VAR1 = {
          'field' => {
                     'f1' => '1234',
                     'name' => 'MyName1'
                   }
        };

while if I have more than one list in the document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<fields>
  <field>
    <f1>1234</f1>
    <name>MyName1</name>
  </field>
  <field>
    <f1>567</f1>
    <name>MyName2</name>
  </field>
</fields>

the results looks like:

$VAR1 = {
          'field' => {
                     'MyName1' => {
                                  'f1' => '1234'
                                },
                     'MyName2' => {
                                  'f1' => '567'
                                }
                   }
        };

while expected results would be:

    $VAR1 = { [
              'field' => {
                         'f1' => '1234',
                         'name' => 'MyName1'
                       },
              'field' => {
                         'f1' => '567',
                         'name' => 'MyName2'
                       }
              ]
            };

what options of XML::Simple parser will prevent tag content substitution with the tag reference and use an array of <field> instead?

Answer 1

By default. XML::Simple names hash keys by the values of tags <name>, <key> and <id>. You can customize this behavior via KeyAttr setting.
Thus, the code which produces the structure closest to what you expect is:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use common::sense;
use Data::Dumper;
use XML::Simple;

local $/ = undef;
say Dumper XMLin(<DATA>, KeyAttr => []);

__DATA__
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<fields>
  <field>
    <f1>1234</f1>
    <name>MyName1</name>
  </field>
  <field>
    <f1>567</f1>
    <name>MyName2</name>
  </field>
</fields>

And here is the output:

$VAR1 = {
      'field' => [
                 {
                   'f1' => '1234',
                   'name' => 'MyName1'
                 },
                 {
                   'f1' => '567',
                   'name' => 'MyName2'
                 }
               ]
    };