Have you had trouble with XML:Simple?

I was (and for the most part, still am) fairly ingnorant in XML. I took some courses, did the tutorials, but when I went to work with shipping integration for UPS and USPS, was at a loss. I planned to write some regexps, but the expanding tree structure of XML presented some challenges I didn't have time for. :D

XML:Simple in combination with Data:Dumper not only made this extremely easy, it made it tons easier to understand where I was going wrong in understanding XML trees. By looking at the output from Data:Dumper, everything just clicked. I was so inspired I went back to some RSS feeds I had manually parsed on previous projects and altered them to use XML:Simple.

I'm not a big fan of modules, the only other ones I use regularly are the CGI,DBI, and Image:Magick modules. But XML:Simple seems to do everything I need.

have you written your parsers in perl? If so maybe upload them to CPAN for others to see and use.

XML::Parser and XML::Simple seem to work OK to me, but I don't use them very often so I am not the best judge of their performance and accuracy.

XML::Parser and XML::Simple are, first of all, extremely slow (15 times slower than my own parser, even with the exact same result and data output). Further, they do have problems with CDATA sections. They also tend to silently die (crash) instead of return an intelligent error. Perl::Lite, for Web Services, also cannot parse certain WSDLs correctly; or, if it parses it, the corresponding data is not valid according to the WSDL.

If you have had better experiences, I'd love to hear them. :)

I'm trying not to be a stinker on the topic. I'd just like to see some implementations that actually work as expected.

And, yes, I wrote my parsers in Perl. I do plan on uploading them to CPAN, but need to do some cleanup first.

[edited by: DrDoc at 7:19 pm (utc) on Sep. 24, 2006]