Mac::PropertyListFilter - Transform XML Property lists into data structure.

  use Mac::PropertyList;
  use Mac::PropertyListFilter qw(xml_filter);
  $data = Mac::PropertyList::parse_plist($string);
  $funcref = [
    #
    # Transform { a=>1,w=>0.6 } to [1,0.6]
    #
    sub {
      my $color = shift;
      if(ref($color) eq 'HASH' and
         defined $color->{a} and
         defined $color->{w}) {
      }
    }
  ];
  $new_data = xml_filter($data,$funcref);

The filter transforms the output of parse_plist() to a more sensible form. Generally, type = 'dict', value => { }> gets transformed to a simple hashref, type = 'array', value => [ ]> gets transformed to an array ref. This transformation will lose data, specifically it retains no type information from the original XML. type = 'real'> gets lost in the shuffle, however this may not be useful to your application, or even misleading.

OmniGraffle 2.0, for instance, uses a string type to represent points, booleans and rectangles. In addition to reshaping the output in this fashion, this lets you transform hashrefs into arrayrefs.

The second parameter to xml_filter() is an arrayref of references to functions. The functions get called in order on every hash and array reference, and element, depth-first. If the function returns any data, it replaces what was there before.

As such, the xml_filter does not actually modify the data structure, unless your subroutines modify data. This can be useful, especially when transforming the OmniGraffle representation of a point "{32, 27}" into something easier to deal with, such as [32,27].

None by default, xml_parser() on request.

Mac::PropertyList, http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd

Jeffrey Goff, <jgoff@cpan.org>

Copyright 2004 by Jeffrey Goff

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.