Perl : Handling duplicate element names using XML::SAX - perl

Question

How to handle duplicate element names in perl XML::SAX module ? Following is my xml file:
<employees>
<employee>
<name>John</name>
<age>gg</age>
<department>Operations</department>
<amount Ccy="EUR">100</amount>
<company>
<name> abc </name>
</company>
</employee>
<employee>
<name>Larry</name>
<age>45</age>
<department>Accounts</department>
<amount Ccy="EUR">200</amount>
<company>
<name> xyz </name>
</company>
</employee>
</employees>
My question is how to access the element employees->employee->company->name? (I should be able to print "abc" and "xyz").The reason I am asking this is because there is one more 'name' element at employees->employee->name which i want to skip. I would like to use XML::SAX only as my environments only supports this module. Please help. Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

Use a stack to keep record of which nodes you're within by pushing every time you enter a node, and poping every time you leave a node:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
use XML::SAX::ParserFactory;
use XML::SAX::PurePerl;
my (#nodes, $characters, #names);
my $factory = new XML::SAX::ParserFactory;
my $handler = new XML::SAX::PurePerl;
my $parser = $factory->parser(
Handler => $handler,
Methods => {
start_element => sub {
push #nodes, shift->{LocalName};
},
characters => sub {
$characters = shift->{Data};
},
end_element => sub {
if (shift->{LocalName} eq 'name' && $nodes[-2] eq 'company') {
push #names, $characters;
}
pop #nodes;
}
}
);
$parser->parse_uri("sample2.xml");
print Dumper \#names;
Output:
$VAR1 = [
' abc ',
' xyz '
];
$nodes[-2] is the second to last element in #nodes and will resolve to 'employee' or 'company' when shift->{LocalName} equals 'name'