Extracting a specific string from an XML file

[ahammad]

Hello,

I have an XML file that I need to extract data from. The file has multiple lines, one of which contains the following tag:

<Owner> owner's name goes here </Owner>

I need to be able to extract the owner's name from the XML file. I have never programmed Perl before, but I have a pretty strong background in C/C++ and Java. You're probably wondering why the hell I'm jumping into this with no experience in Perl...it wasn't my choice, really. I just started working for a company and the person in charge of the Perl scripts is no longer here, and I just happened to be the only person free enough to take over the project.

I've been doing some research on regular expressions and I found this code:

if($mystring =~ m/start(.*)end/) {
    print $1;
}

Apparently, this would print everything between the word "start" and "end". Based on this, would the following code work?

if($mystring =~ m/<Owner>(.*)</Owner>/) {
    print $1;
}

I'm thinking that the / in </Owner> would cause problems...how would that be fixed?

Thanks for your help.

[eWish]

Really you should probably look at using XML::Simple or XML::Parser. However, you can do it the way you are thinking. To keep </Owners> from causing problems just escape the forward slash.

my $xml_file = 'myfile.xml';
my @owners;
 
open(my $XMLFILE, '<', $xml_file) ||die "Can't open file: $!";
while (my $line =<$XMLFILE>) {
 
    if($line =~ /<Owners>(.*)<\/Owners>/) {
    push @owners, $1;
    }
} 
close($XMLFILE);
 
print join("\n", @owners);

Not sure how big of a file you are talking about. So, there could be a performance issue.