My next project in the “whittling wood”?  Figuring out why XML::RSS::LibXML parses these tags without any problem:

<itunes:category text="News &amp; Politics"/>
<itunes:image href="http://media.npr.org/images/podcasts/2013/primary/hourly_news_summary-c464279737c989a5fbf3049bc229152af3c36b9d.png?s=1400"/>

and produces this internal data structure:

      category => bless( {
        _attributes => [
          "text"
        ],
        _content => "",
        text => "News & Politics"
      }, 'XML::RSS::LibXML::MagicElement' ),
      image => bless( {
        _attributes => [
          "href"
        ],
        _content => "",
        href => "http://media.npr.org/images/podcasts/2013/primary/hourly_news_summary-c464279737c989a5fbf3049bc229152af3c36b9d.png?s=1400"
      }, 'XML::RSS::LibXML::MagicElement' ),

But then doesn’t have these tags anywhere in the re-rendered XML when it spits it back out again. I know it has to do with the fact that these tags have no content (there’s no opening and closing tag, there’s just the one tag closed with a />), but I don’t know why XML::RSS isn’t properly rendering it when it converts the data structure back to XML.

The easy work-around would be to just do some string matching, recognize these tags in the original XML, copy them and re-insert them into the rendered XML afterwards.

The more difficult fix is to figure out what’s wrong with XML::RSS and try to fix it myself.

Guess which road I’m taking?