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Now that we've had taste of querying embedded XML tags in an HTML file, let's put our new skills to practical use. http://www.internetnews.com is a comprehensive news site that categorizes news into several sub-sections. The headlines for these news categories are available in XML format. A few of the available categories are:
Each file contains several <headline> tags similar to the following: Each <headline> tag represents one news headline and contains both url and text attributes, which contain the URL to the news story and a text summary describing the story respectively. With minor modifications to xml-fetch.pl, we could easily gather the headlines and present them in HTML format. We'll name the script inet-news.pl and modify the &Print_Header and &Print_Element subroutines to print the HTML headlines summary. Using the same method we used with xml-fetch.pl, we can now build a URL that instructs the script to fetch the headline tag from the news XML file and build an HTML summary. As with xml-fetch.pl, we could build the URL directly, or use a form. Of course, it's easier to build the URL by using the form. Here's how:
Try the different URLs from above to see the headlines for that news category. Use the resulting URL in your browser if you would like to create a link to the news summary. Congratulations, you've just written a script that does something useful with XML embedded tags. You could use this script to add real-time news to your Web site, or modify it to fit another need on your Web site. Below are the links that build news summaries for each category:
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home / experts / perl / tutorial / 1 |
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Produced by Jonathan
Eisenzopf and
Created: Feb. 14, 1999
Revised: Sep. 19, 1999
URL: http://www.webreference.com/perl/tutorial1/