Organizing data with XPath in Perl - perl

Question

I am using this line of code to get two data entries from an XML file
perl xmlPerl.pl zbxml.xml "//zabbix_export/templates/template/items/item/name/text() | //zabbix_export/templates/template/items/item/description/text()"
Which takes the data, and displays it vertically. For example:
name1
description1
name2
description2
I used this in c# and had some code so that it would display like this
name1 - description1
name2 - description2
name3 - (blank since there
isnt a description)
there were even some blanks in description. Here is the c# code, since it may help.
XPathExpression expr;
expr = nav.Compile("/zabbix_export/templates/template/items/item/name | /zabbix_export/templates/template/items/item/description");
XPathNodeIterator iterator = nav.Select(expr);
//Iterate on the node set
List<string> listBox1 = new List<string>();
listBox1.Clear();
try
{
while (iterator.MoveNext())
{
XPathNavigator nav2 = iterator.Current.Clone();
// nav2.Value;
listBox1.Add(nav2.Value);
Console.Write(nav2.Value);
iterator.MoveNext();
nav2 = iterator.Current.Clone();
Console.Write("-" + nav2.Value + "\n");
Well, I am having to switch it to Perl now, and I am not sure if I should try and find some Perl code to do what I need, or if this can be done in XPath? I tried looking at some w3 tutorials, but didn't find what I was looking for.
Thanks!
edit -
would I need to edit this part of my xmlPerl.pl
# print each node in the list
foreach my $node ( $nodeset->get_nodelist ) {
print XML::XPath::XMLParser::as_string( $node ) . "\n";
}

Answer 1

It cannot be done with an XPath. It can be done with an XSL transformation:
<xsl:stylesheet
version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="text"/>
<xsl:template match="text()"/>
<xsl:template match="item">
<xsl:value-of select="concat(name,' - ',description,'
')"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
A simple Perl script that applies this XSLT will do the trick - see this for example (or any other command-line utility that applies an XSLT for that matter - like msxsl.exe)