Question

I’m using Perl’s XML::Simple to parse deeply nested XML and would like to extract a small list of elements about 4 levels down:

A   B     C        D1       D2       D3 

Ideally I want to do this on the input step, if possible. Like this:

my @list = XMLin($xml, { SomeAttribute => 'ButWhat?' }); 

ending up with the same thing as if I did:

@list = ('D1', 'D2', 'D3') 

Is is possible? Or just not that ‘simple’?

Answer 1

Thanks for all the suggestions.

In the end I ducked the problem of traversing the data structure by using an eval block.

my $xml_tree; my @list;  eval {     # just go for it    my @list = @{ $xml_tree->{A}->{B}->{C} };  };  if ($@) {    say 'oops - xml is not in expected format - and that happens sometimes'; }