Perl XML::LibXML textContent

Question

Is there any way how to keep tags of nodes from xml code? Explanation of the problem could be like this: I have an xml input, I query the input and I want to get xml output of the queried items.

<pets>
  <dog>
    <name>Maggie</name>
    <dob>12 October 2005</dob>
    <price>75</price>
    <owner>Rosie</owner>
  </dog>
</pets>

When I access //pets/dog in my Perl program, the output is as follows:

<?xml version='1.0' standalone='yes'?>
<dog>
    Maggie
    12 October 2005
    75
    Rosie
</dog>

Is there any way to give the function textContent some parameter to keep the tags? This is a block of my cycle code that puts the nodes into hash, then outputs it:

$parser = XML::LibXML->new();
$data = $parser->load_xml(string => $takeninput);
$xml = new XML::LibXML::XPathContext($data);
$i = 0;
for $node ($xml->findnodes('//pets/dog'))
  {
    $name = $node->nodeName;
    $hash{$name}[$i] = $node->textContent;
    $i++;
  }

To keep the tags of children? To have the output like this:

<?xml version='1.0' standalone='yes'?>
<dog>
    <name>Maggie</name>
    <dob>12 October 2005</dob>
    <price>75</price>
    <owner>Rosie</owner>
</dog>

Thank you for answers.

Answer 1

The library is doing exactly what you asked - it is returning the text content of the node. Markup isn't text content so it doesn't give it to you.

What I think you want is $node->toString, which will return the dog node as formatted XML.

For a pretty layout, use $node->toString(1)