Parser::Style::Tree(3)

NAME
XML::Parser::Style::Tree

SYNOPSIS
  use XML::Parser;
  my $p = XML::Parser->new(Style => 'Tree');
  my $tree = $p->parsefile('foo.xml');

DESCRIPTION
This module implements XML::Parser's Tree style parser.

When parsing a document, "parse()" will return a parse tree for the document. Each node in the tree takes the form of a tag, content pair. Text nodes are represented with a pseudo-tag of "0" and the string that is their content. For elements, the content is an array reference. The first item in the array is a (possibly empty) hash reference containing attributes. The remainder of the array is a sequence of tag-content pairs representing the content of the element.

So for example the result of parsing:

  <foo><head id="a">Hello <em>there</em></head><bar>Howdy<ref/></bar>do</foo>

would be:
             Tag Content
  ==================================================================
  [foo, [{}, head, [{id => "a"}, 0, "Hello ", em, [{}, 0, "there"]],
              bar, [ {}, 0, "Howdy", ref, [{}]],
                0, "do"
        ]
  ]

The root document "foo", has 3 children: a "head" element, a "bar" element and the text "do". After the empty attribute hash, these are represented in it's contents by 3 tag-content pairs.