2011/6/7 Dan Linder
<dan@linder.org>
Is there a more current page or discussion about Perl XML modules? I'm not opposed to using XPath (though the Perl Wiki warns against it because it appears to be no longer maintained), but if I come across a show-stopping bug, I don't want to invest a lot of coding time if the module doesn't have an active or responsive development record.
I don't know of a better page for Perl XML info, but I can offer a bit of info on XML::XPath and the suggested replacement.
XML::XPath is a pure-Perl implementation. I usually grab it for quick and dirty stuff because it's easily fast enough for my needs, and doesn't require external dependencies. If you want something similar that is more actively maintained, I'd suggest looking at XML::LibXML. It uses the GNOME libxml library to do the heavy lifting, and it also provides a similar xpath interface. In my experience, for small XML::XPath projects, porting form XML::XPath to XML::LibXML probably wouldn't take much effort[0]. Matt Seargent, the guy behind XML::XPath, was also the (or one of the) initial guys behind XML::LibXML, so the xpath part looks pretty similar between them.
Most distributions have packages for XML::LibXML, but if you're pulling/building it from cpan, you'll need both libxml and its dev/devel package with headers and such.
Dan
[0] Take my experience here with a grain of salt. The code I was converting totaled less than 200 lines, and the XML related stuff was only a few dozen lines or so of the code.