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XML-Simple (2.18)

Original review: Very handy!

OK, that was a useless review. Really, though, XML::Simple, though not general-purpose, has saved me so much time and has done The Right Thing so many times that I could hardly imagine coding without it.

Darren Kulp - 2008-07-24 08:56:46
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XML-Simple (2.16)

Excellent and easy to use module. It probably should be better named XML::Config or something like that due to its original purpose of parsing XML config files. Either that, or make the options "KeepRoot => 1" and "KeyAttr => []" the default for parsing generic XML files, otherwise users searching for a simple generic XML parser will get confused by the resulting PERL data structure.
Overall a simple and handy module that is fun to use.

Franz Fasching - 2007-03-07 04:24:04
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XML-Simple (2.14)

I gave this module a good rating since I think you can use it efficiently to dig some information from a xml document in a few lines, however I believe this module is ill-named : compare to a LWP::Simple for example, XML::Simple is much harder to use for a beginner, I would even say it's harder than most of the others XML processing module :

Since the module isn't strict in its structure building, it's easy to get subtle bugs which don't appear with all documents but only on specific instance (e.g. an element that appears most frequently in a list will normally be put in an array, but if it appears alone once, it will not be put in an array, you need to specifically say to XML::Simple you always want this element in an array... to a beginner who check on 2 or 3 examples this can easily bite him !).
This module allows for the most compact xml parsing and accessing among the XML modules (in some case) but not for the most simple, thus it should probably be renamed to something more appropriate (XML::CompactAddressing ? XML::Concise ?) and be advertised for its conciseness, not for its simplicity.

--
Jedaï

Chaddaï Fouché - 2006-07-12 10:32:26
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XML-Simple (2.14)

Highly recommended for turning XML into perl and vice versa.

All aspects are highly configurable, although the default interface is so well configured you may not need to configure any further. If you do, the POD is clear and detailed (a rara combination).

The author is great: quick to respond, quick to fix bugs, and polite when pointing out operator error.

The only thing it lacks is support for "mixed content" XML, that is XML where elements contain both text nodes and other elemeents. As the author says in the POD, if it supported mixed content, it'd not be Simple!

Lee Goddard - 2006-07-03 06:18:08
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XML-Simple (2.12)

Helped me soup up a parser for our dependncy format to feed that
into visualizing app. Really easy to use, well documented, and
has the simplest interface there is.

Greg Steuck - 2004-09-19 00:28:32
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XML-Simple (2.12)

Brilliant! A great example of why I like perl so much, straight forward, simple yet powerful way to read xml. Beats all that messing about with childnodes and so on.

Matthew Lock - 2004-04-30 21:54:40
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XML-Simple (2.11)

just works fine and is easy to use !

A. Spohr - 2004-03-05 15:10:06
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XML-Simple (2.09)

great module! provides a super convenient interface to working with a XML file. invaluable!

Shava Smallen - 2004-02-26 02:42:56
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XML-Simple (2.09)

Simple to use. Documentation clear and easy to understand. Very useful module.

Phillip Hamiliton-Wilks - 2004-02-11 04:00:40
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XML-Simple (2.09)

I use this module all the time for simple configuration files. It's very handy to be able to transform XML to a Perl data structure and vice versa. It doesn't get much easier than the XMLin() and XMLout() subroutines.

Todd Caine - 2003-09-09 08:59:15
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