xmlperlxml-parsinglibxml2xml-libxml

XML:Find particular node in XML using LibXML

I have an XML file which has only one node called import. I want to find the href attribute of import. I tried using findnodes(), but that returns a list I would have to search further, so I was hoping there was a way to find a particular node which has only one occurence. I tried getChildrenByTagName but that gives the error 

Can't locate object method "getChildrenByTagName" via package "XML::LibXML::Document"

I also tried grep which gives a similar error

Can't locate object method "grep" via package "XML::LibXML::Document"

My XML file is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<resource name="data" type="application/dictionary+xml">
<schema>
    <import href="tobefound.xml"/>
</schema>
</resource>

My code so far is 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use XML::LibXML;

my $name = $ARGV[1];
my $dom = XML::LibXML->load_xml(location => $name);
my @node= $dom->findnodes('//import');
print "List: @node\n";

Please let me know if there is a way to find only one particular node without needing to traverse the whole dom and without having to store it as a list. Thank you.

Solution

  • XML doesn't guarantee uniqueness, so any sort of search will return a list of results. This list might be of length 0 or 1, just like with grep.

    But the easy answer is to just grab the first result:

    my ($node) = $dom -> findnodes('//import');

    failing that - specify in your xpath:

    my ( $node ) = $dom -> findnodes ( '(//import)[1]' );

    I'm afraid I don't know if that latter will in fact bail out when 'enough' nodes have been selected though.