Question

I’m just learning PERL. I’ve read some docs on parsing XML and reused some of my colleague’s code. But I can’t seem to get it to simply print out a list of the 3 football player names in this data. Please help. Here is the PERL code:

    #! /usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use DBI;
use XML::Simple;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request;
use Time::gmtime;
use Time::Local;
use Data::Dumper;

sub statsInit(){
  my $xml_api_url = "http://myprovider.com/nfldata.xml";
  my $xml = getXML($xml_api_url);
  my $xmlData = xml2Simple($xml);
  print "Hello World";
  foreach my $player (@{$xmlData->{player}}){
    my $playername = $player->{name};
    print "pn = $playername | ";
  }
}


sub getXML($){
    my ($xmlURL) = @_;
    my $dataresponse = '';
    my $agent = LWP::UserAgent->new(env_proxy => 1, keep_alive => 1, timeout => 100);
    my $header = HTTP::Request->new(GET => $xmlURL);
    my $request = HTTP::Request->new('GET', $xmlURL, $header);
    my $response = $agent->request($request);
    if($response->is_success){
        $dataresponse = $response->content(); #Loaded data from FINAL_XML
    }
    return $dataresponse;
}

sub xml2Simple(){
    my ($xml) = @_;
    my $xmlObj = XML::Simple->new(KeyAttr => {});
    my $xmlData = '';
    my $parsedData = '';
    if($xml){
        $xmlData = $xmlObj->XMLin($xml);
    }
    return $xmlData;
}

statsInit();
-------- NOW BELOW IS THE RETRIEVED XML DATA --------
    <season xmlns="http://myprovider.com/schema/nfl/statistics-v1.0.xsd" season="2012" season_type="REG">
<team id="BUF" name="Bills" market="Buffalo">
    <players>
        <player id="100" name="Nick Barnett" games_played="1" games_started="1" jersey="50" position="OLB">
            <defense tackle="7" ast="2" />
        </player>
        <player id="101" name="Ryan Fitzpatrick" games_played="1" games_started="1" jersey="14" position="QB">
            <rushing att="2" yds="8" />
            <passing att="32" cmp="18" yds="195" td="3" int="3"/>
        </player>
        <player id="102" name="Fred Jackson" games_played="1" games_started="1" jersey="22" position="RB">
            <rushing att="6" yds="15" td="0"/>
        </player>
    </players>
</team>
</season>

So my code seems to retrieve the data ok, and I get no errors. “Hello World” gets printed. But it never goes into the players loop and doesn’t print any player names. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

I figured it out. I guess I had to change this line.

foreach my $player (@{$xmlData->{player}}){

to this:

foreach my $player (@{$xmlData->{team}{players}{player}}){