Parser::Style::Tree(3) User Contributed Perl Documentation Parser::Style::Tree(3)

# [NAME](#NAME)

XML::Parser::Style::Tree - Tree style parser

# [SYNOPSIS](#SYNOPSIS)

```
  use XML::Parser;
  my $p = XML::Parser->new(Style => 'Tree');
  my $tree = $p->parsefile('foo.xml');
```

# [DESCRIPTION](#DESCRIPTION)

This module implements XML::Parser's Tree style parser.

When parsing a document, parse() will return a parse tree for the document. Each node in the tree takes the form of a tag, content pair. Text nodes are represented with a pseudo-tag of "0" and the string that is their content. For elements, the content is an array reference. The first item in the array is a (possibly empty) hash reference containing attributes. The remainder of the array is a sequence of tag-content pairs representing the content of the element.

So for example the result of parsing:

```
  <foo><head id="a">Hello <em>there</em></head><bar>Howdy<ref/></bar>do</foo>
```

would be:

```
             Tag   Content
  ==================================================================
  [foo, [{}, head, [{id => "a"}, 0, "Hello ",  em, [{}, 0, "there"]],
              bar, [         {}, 0, "Howdy",  ref, [{}]],
                0, "do"
        ]
  ]
```

The root document "foo", has 3 children: a "head" element, a "bar" element and the text "do". After the empty attribute hash, these are represented in it's contents by 3 tag-content pairs.

## [Entity Expansion](#Entity_Expansion)

The underlying Expat parser always expands predefined XML entity references ("&lt;", "&gt;", "&amp;", "&quot;", "&apos;") in both text content and attribute values before they reach the Tree style handlers. This is required by the XML specification and cannot be prevented. For example, "&lt;" in the source XML will appear as "&lt;" in the resulting tree structure.

If you need access to the original unexpanded text, consider using the handler-based API with the "original\_string" method on the Expat object instead of the Tree style.

2026-10-26 perl v5.44.0

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Document: XML::Parser::Style::Tree(3pm) from perl-xml-parser 2.59-r5 (Chainguard OS)
Source: https://github.com/toddr/XML-Parser