How do I use Perl to parse Twitter XML?

Question

I'm using cURL to get the XML file for my Twitter friend's timeline. (API here.)

Currently (though I'd be open for more suggestions) I am using Perl to parse the XML. This is my first time using Perl and I really don't know what I am doing. Currently this is my code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
# use module
use XML::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;
# Create object.
$xml = new XML::Simple;
# Read XML file.
$data = $xml->XMLin("/tmp/data.xml");
# Print output.
print Dumper($data);

Now I want to go through the XML and print out each person's name and then what they tweeted. Currently I have not found a good guide on Perl's foreach loop when there is a complicated data structure like this one.

How can I achieve this?

(Any other ways to parse the XML in a terminal friendly environment would be nice to know about as well)

Answer 1

There's no generic answer - it depends on the content of your data.xml. For the example on the page you can do the following:

foreach my $unode ( values %{$data->{status}} ) {
  print "$unode->{user}->{name} \t $unode->{created_at} \t $unode->{text} \n";
}

output:

Doug Williams    Tue Apr 07 22:52:51 +0000 2009          At least I can get your humor through tweets. RT @abdur: I don't mean this in a bad way, but genetically speaking your a cul-de-sac.

What it does is - it gets the hashref called 'status', dereferences it, and then iterates through its values, which are hashrefs too, assigning each of them to $unode.

You can also look at print Dumper $unode to see what else is available there. Also note that XML::Simple can be a little tricky in how it parses xml - sometimes you may need to pass in extra parameters to make it create arrays where you want it to - check out the docs

Programming Perl Chapter 9 gives you an introduction of the different nested data structures in perl.

Answer 2

Why not use the Net::Twitter API on CPAN?