XML, the Extensible Markup Language, is an all-purpose container of textual information, which offers tremendous flexibility for publishing and storing your data. Perl, with its quick-and-easy syntax, its strong text processing capability, and wide range of support from the open source community, it's a natural choice for crunching XML. In this 3-hour presentation, Jason McIntosh and Erik Ray describe what you can do with XML, the most popular Perl modules for XML hacking, and offer some tips for starting your own Perl-XML projects. Among the topics to be covered are parsers, XPath, event-based processing, tree-based processing, databases, and character encodings.

Prerequisites
Attendees will have a basic knowledge of Perl programming, and grasp the fundamentals of XML. It would help to have had some experience processing text and using XML tools such as parsers, validators, and the like.

Skills you will Learn

• How to check the syntax of, and validate documents using, XML::Parser.
• XPath, a cool way to extract data from XML documents.
• Applications that benefit from event processing, using PerlSAX in examples.
• When tree-based processing is necessary, using Grove for examples.
• How to access databases with XML.
• Techniques and pitfalls for working with Unicode and character encodings.

Read ComicsML: A Simple Markup Language for Comics by Jason McIntosh on O'Reilly's XML.com.