Generating XML Documents from Text Files

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Generating a Simple SVG Document with Perl

Consider the red rectangle displayed in Figure 17.1.

Figure 17.1: A red rectangle.

The Perl script  simplePerl1.pl in Listing 17.1 generates an SVG document that renders a rectangle.

Listing 17.1 simplePerl1.pl

print "<svg>\n"; print "  <g transform=\"translate(50,50)\">\n"; print "  <rect x=\"0\" y=\"50\"  width=\"20\"                 height=\"50\"\n"; print "        style=\"fill:red\"/>\n"; print "  </g>\n"; print "</svg>\n";

The SVG document script in Listing 17.2 is the output of the Perl script in Listing 17.1.

Listing 17.2 simplePerl1.svg

<svg>  <g transform="translate(50,50)">    <rect x="0" y="50"  width="20" height="50"          style="fill:red"/>  </g> </svg>

Remarks

After you have added the directory containing the Perl executable to your PATH variable, you can generate the SVG document displayed in Listing 17.2 by invoking Perl from the command line as follows:

perl -w simplePerl1.pl >simplePerl1.svg

The Perl script in Listing 17.2 contains of a set of print statements that print each line of SVG code. While this is acceptable for very small SVG documents, this technique becomes cumbersome with SVG documents that are more than a page in length. A slightly better approach is demonstrated in the next example.

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