[Melbourne-pm] Using perl libraries to apply XSL to XML

[Daniel Pittman]

Ben Marsh <blmarsh at gmail.com> writes:

> I am writing a www bot that gets xml from a website that includes a
> xsl stylesheet to apply to the xml to give html. Browsers seem to do
> this for us when browsing the site.

Well, modern ones do.  I still remember the days before XSLT support was
widespread. ;)

> WWW::Mechanize does not seem to?

No, although you could theoretically write a plugin...

> I wrote some code but hit a conundrum.? How do I get the url of the
> xsl from the xml content, fetch it via http and apply it to the xml
> using XML::LibXSLT?

[...]

> the xml starts with:
>
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="/something.xsl"?>

See that line?  That is a standard and all, so you can (reasonably)
robustly rely on that stylesheet declaration together with the standard
HTTP rules for URL combination to locate and fetch the stylesheet.

Regards,
        Daniel