Summary

This chapter contained simple examples that used the Perl print command to generate reports after parsing XML documents. The purpose of this chapter was to show you how to use the sequential Perl XML parser modules. The examples in this chapter provide you with a series of templates (one for each of the major sequential XML Perl parser modules) that can be easily extended to do just about anything you want with the parsed data. Remember, sometimes the difficult part is parsing the data (that is, getting it to a point where you can send it to a report using a Perl print statement).

Now that you actually have access to the data contained inside the XML documents (that is, the contents of the output reports), it would be easy to push the parsed data into a database table using the Perl DBI, display the results on a web page in an HTML table using XSLT, or even generate another XML document. All these topics (and more) are covered in the upcoming chapters. You may have been under the impression that parsing the XML document would be difficult and confusing (which is understandable). However, as I have just demonstrated, it probably wasn't as difficult as you first thought. A lot of people have spent a great deal of time working on these modules to make them as simple as possible, and they've done a great job!