XML::Parser::Style::Tree(3pm)

XML::Parser::Style::Tree3pm

Tree style parser

Usage

  use XML::Parser;
  my $p = XML::Parser->new(Style => 'Tree');
  my $tree = $p->parsefile('foo.xml');

Overview

This module implements XML::Parser's Tree style parser.

When parsing a document, parse() will return a parse tree for the document. Each node in the tree takes the form of a tag, content pair. Text nodes are represented with a pseudo-tag of "0" and the string that is their content. For elements, the content is an array reference. The first item in the array is a (possibly empty) hash reference containing attributes. The remainder of the array is a sequence of tag-content pairs representing the content of the element.

So for example the result of parsing:

  <foo><head id="a">Hello <em>there</em></head><bar>Howdy<ref/></bar>do</foo>

would be:

             Tag   Content
  ==================================================================
  [foo, [{}, head, [{id => "a"}, 0, "Hello ",  em, [{}, 0, "there"]],
              bar, [         {}, 0, "Howdy",  ref, [{}]],
                0, "do"
        ]
  ]

The root document "foo", has 3 children: a "head" element, a "bar" element and the text "do". After the empty attribute hash, these are represented in it's contents by 3 tag-content pairs.

Entity Expansion

The underlying Expat parser always expands predefined XML entity references ("&lt;", "&gt;", "&amp;", "&quot;", "&apos;") in both text content and attribute values before they reach the Tree style handlers. This is required by the XML specification and cannot be prevented. For example, "&lt;" in the source XML will appear as "<" in the resulting tree structure.

If you need access to the original unexpanded text, consider using the handler-based API with the "original_string" method on the Expat object instead of the Tree style.

Releases

12 releases since Debian 3.1 (Sarge); the text changed 10 times.

  1. 3.1
  2. 4.0
  3. 5.0–6.0
  4. 7
  5. 8
  6. 9
  7. 10
  8. 11
  9. 12
  10. 13
  11. Arch

From perl-xml-parser 2.59-2 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.