Question

I would like your help in the following :

given the .xml file :

<network>
    <netelement>
            <node pwd="KOR-ASBG" func="describe_SBG_TGC">
                    <collection category="IMT" dir="Stream_statistics"></collection>
                                    </node>
    </netelement>
    <netelement>
            <node pwd="ADR-ASBG" func="describe_SBG_TGC">
                    <collection category="IMT" dir="Stream_statistics"></collection>
                    <collection category="IMT" dir="Proxy_registrar_statistics_ACCESS"></collection>
            </node>
    </netelement></network>

What I would like to do is to get the element with the attribute “KOR-ASBG”, for example,
but using only XPath.

I have written the following Perl code :

#!/usr/bin/perl         -w

use             strict ;
use             warnings ;
use             XML::LibXML ;
use             Data::Dump qw(dump) ;


my $dump = "/some_path/_NETELEMENT_.xml" ;
my $parser = new XML::LibXML ; my $doc ;
eval{ $doc = $parser->parse_file($dump) ; } ;
if( !$doc ) { print "failed to parse $dump" ; next ; }
my $root = $doc->getDocumentElement ;

my $_demo = $root->find('/network/netelement/node[@pwd="KOR-ASBG"]') ;
print dump($_demo)."\n" ;

But, what it gets dispalyed is :

bless([bless(do{\(my $o = 155172440)}, "XML::LibXML::Element")], "XML::LibXML::NodeList")

So the question would be, how can I get the XML Element that contains the “pwd” attribute (that equals “KOR-ASBG”), using XPath ?

Thank you 🙂

PS. I have also tried :

my @_demo = $root->findnodes('/network/netelement/node[@pwd="KOR-ASBG"]') ;
print dump(@_demo)."\n" ;

and what it gets displayed is :

bless(do{\(my $o = 179552448)}, "XML::LibXML::Element")

Answer 1

Your dumper object is not lying to you; you are getting a node list. To access it you may either iterate through it or just access the first node:

print $_demo->get_node(0)->toString()

Of course, all DOM methods are available to you once you get the actual node:

print $_demo->get_node(0)->getAttribute('func');