How can I escape text for an XML document in Perl?

Question

Anyone know of any Perl module to escape text in an XML document?

I\'m generating XML which will contain text that was entered by the user. I want to correctly handl

Answer 1

For programs that need to handle every special case, by all means use an official library for this task. However, theoretically there are only 5 characters that need escaping in XML.

So, for one-offs that you don't want to pull in an extra library for, the following perl expression should suffice:

perl -pe 's/\&/\&amp;/g; s/</\&lt;/g; s/>/\&gt;/g; s/"/\&quot;/g; s/'"'"'/\&apos;/g'

Answer 2

The XML::Simple escape_value could be used also, but use of XML::Simple is not recommended for new programs. See this post post 17436965.

A manual escape could be done using regex (copied from escape_value):

$data =~ s/&/&/sg;
$data =~ s/</&lt;/sg;
$data =~ s/>/&gt;/sg;
$data =~ s/"/&quot;/sg;

Answer 3

XML::Entities:

use XML::Entities;
my $a_encoded = XML::Entities::numify('all', $a);

Edit: XML::Entities only numifies HTML entities. Use HTML::Entities encode_entities($a) instead

Answer 4

Use XML::Code.

From CPAN

XML::code escape()

Normally any content of the node will be escaped during rendering (i. e. special symbols like '&' will be replaced by corresponding entities). Call escape() with zero argument to prevent it:

        my $p = XML::Code->('p');
        $p->set_text ("—");
        $p->escape (0);
        print $p->code(); # prints <p>&#8212;</p>
        $p->escape (1);
        print $p->code(); # prints <p>&amp;#8212;</p>

Answer 5

Use

XML::Generator

require XML::Generator;

my $xml = XML::Generator->new( ':pretty', escape => 'always,apos' );

print $xml->h1( " &< >non-html plain text< >&" );

which will print all content inside the tags escaped (no conflicts with the markup).

Answer 6

I personally prefer XML::LibXML - Perl binding for libxml. One of the pros - it uses one of the fastest XML processing library available. Here is an example for creating text node:

use XML::LibXML;
my $doc = XML::LibXML::Document->new('1.0',$some_encoding);
my $element = $doc->createElement($name);
$element->appendText($text);
$xml_fragment = $element->toString();
$xml_document = $doc->toString();

And, never, ever create XML by hand. It's gonna be bad for your health when people find out what you did.