Back in 1999/2000 when I was first learning Perl, I read an article by a Perl advocate in which he said he believes Perl would become the best language to do XML with. Having been impressed by Perl’s power and ease-of-use (coming from C and Pascal) I imagined how great it would be if Perl’s strengths and ease of use were applied to XML-processing.

However years passed and I couldn’t find a module easy and intuitive enough for me for processing XML. So in 2006 I made my own pure-perl module for personal usage, called XML::MyXML.

It was so easy even I could use it. And I happily develop it until today.

Among other things (parse XML), it lets you treat XML as easily as JSON.

Here’s an example:

use XML::MyXML ':all';

print simple_to_xml(
    {
        a => {
            a1 => 123,
            a2 => 234,
            a3 => [city => 'New York', city => 'Boston', city => 'Moscow'],
        }
    },
    {tidy => 1},
);

Outputs:

<a>
    <a1>123</a1>
    <a2>234</a2>
    <a3>
        <city>New York</city>
        <city>Boston</city>
        <city>Moscow</city>
    </a3>
</a>

Or this example, if you want to create attributes (eg color=”blue”) in your elements:

my @points = ({lat => 10, lng => 10, color => 'blue'}, {lat => 11, lng => 11, color => 'red'}, {lat => 12, lng => 12});

sub point_to_simple {
    my $point = shift;
    my $color = $point->{color};
    return (
        # set (2n+1)'th element to be a ref instead of string, to easily set up element's attributes, not just tag
        [point => {color => $color}] => {
            coords => "$point->{lat},$point->{lng}"
        },
    );
}

print simple_to_xml(
    {
        'Points title="my points document"' => [
            map point_to_simple($_), @points
        ],
    },
    {tidy => 1},
);

This produces the following XML:

<Points title="my points document">
    <point color="blue">
        <coords>10,10</coords>
    </point>
    <point color="red">
        <coords>11,11</coords>
    </point>
    <point>
        <coords>12,12</coords>
    </point>
</Points>

I often have to generate KML files for Google Earth, and this module makes it possible with very short scripts.

You can find more about this module here: XML::MyXML on metacpan

Please write in the comments below, I’d like to know your opinion: Is it module good? Are there other easier-to-use modules on CPAN for this job? Is it powerful enough for others to use? Would you recommend it? And what do you think is missing from it to make it worthy of use by a wider audience?

Thanks!