It’s been years since I’ve had to hack on anything XML-related, but a recent project at work has me once again jumping into the waters of generating, parsing, and modifying this 90s-era document format. Most developers these days likely only know of it as part of the curiously-named XMLHTTPRequest object in web browsers used to retrieve data in JSON format from servers, and as the “X” in AJAX. But here we are in 2021, and there are still plenty of APIs and documents using XML to get their work done.

In my particular case, the task is to update the API calls for a new version of Virtuozzo Automator. Its API is a bit unusual in that it doesn’t use HTTP but rather relies on opening a TLS-encrypted socket to the server and exchanging documents delimited with a null character. The previous version of our code is in 1990s-sysadmin-style Perl, with manual ing of objects and parsing the XML using regular expressions. I’ve decided to update it to use the Moo object system and a proper XML parser. But which parser and module to use?

Source: DZone