XML and Perl

Chapter Roadmap

Now that we have covered some introductory material in the first two chapters, we’re going to discuss XML parser modules. Remember, the purpose of an XML parser is to parse XML data. Why would we want to do that? So that we can extract the important information (that is, the information contained between start and end tags) contained in the XML data.

Note that I’m using the term XML data rather than XML file. That’s because XML data can exist in a number of formats—an actual file stored on a hard disk, data sent across a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) or User Datagram Protocol (UDP) socket, or in memory as a dynamically generated result of a database query. No matter where the XML data resides, eventually someone will need ...