How can I create XML from Perl?

Just for the record, here's a snippet that uses XML::LibXML.

#!/usr/bin/env perl## Create a simple XML document#use strict;use warnings;use XML::LibXML;my $doc = XML::LibXML::Document->new('1.0', 'utf-8');my $root = $doc->createElement('my-root-element');$root->setAttribute('some-attr'=> 'some-value');my %tags = (    color => 'blue',    metal => 'steel',);for my $name (keys %tags) {    my $tag = $doc->createElement($name);    my $value = $tags{$name};    $tag->appendTextNode($value);    $root->appendChild($tag);}$doc->setDocumentElement($root);print $doc->toString();

and this outputs:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><my-root-element some-attr="some-value">    <color>blue</color>    <metal>steel</metal></my-root-element>

XML::Writer is still maintained (at least, as of February of this year), and it's indeed one of the favorite Perl XML writers out there.

As for describing the syntax, one is better to look at the module's documentation (the link is already in the question). To wit:

use XML::Writer;my $writer = new XML::Writer();  # will write to stdout$writer->startTag("greeting",                   "class" => "simple");$writer->characters("Hello, world!");$writer->endTag("greeting");$writer->end();# produces <greeting class='simple'>Hello world!</greeting>

If you want to take a data structure in Perl and turn it into XML, XML::Simple will do the job nicely.

At its simplest:

my $hashref = { foo => 'bar', baz => [ 1, 2, 3 ] };use XML::Simple;my $xml = XML::Simple::XMLout($hashref);

As its name suggests, its basic usage is simple; however it does offer a lot of features if you need them.

Naturally, it can also parse XML easily.