REXML advice - output

Ruby
1

Hey all,

I would like to pick your brains about Rexml and how to report from it.
For example, I am reading an XML file using references to each XML tag
like so:

doc.root.each_element("/UserData/List/ItemInfo/Title") {|e|
report.puts “Title: #{e.text}”
}
doc.root.each_element("/UserData/List/ItemInfo/Date") {|e|
report.puts “Date: #{e.text}”
}

The ‘report.puts’ writes this data out to a CSV file. At present I get a
list of all the titles in the XML file followed a list of the dates.
What I need it to get the side by side in a CSV file like so

Title Date
Item1 20th Jan 2009
Item2 12th Feb 2010

Does anyone have any suggestions on a suitable workflow for this?

Many thanks

2

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 4:42 PM, Stuart C.
[email protected] wrote:

report.puts “Date: #{e.text}”
Does anyone have any suggestions on a suitable workflow for this?
Just iterate over all “ItemInfo” elements and print values from sub
elements (which you can select via a relative XPath).

Kind regards

robert

3

Robert K. wrote:

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 4:42 PM, Stuart C.
[email protected] wrote:

�report.puts “Date: #{e.text}”
Does anyone have any suggestions on a suitable workflow for this?
Just iterate over all “ItemInfo” elements and print values from sub
elements (which you can select via a relative XPath).

Kind regards

robert
Thanks for getting back to me. I will look into this and see how I get
on.

Thanks a lot Robert.

4

Robert K. wrote:

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 4:42 PM, Stuart C.
[email protected] wrote:

�report.puts “Date: #{e.text}”
Does anyone have any suggestions on a suitable workflow for this?
Just iterate over all “ItemInfo” elements and print values from sub
elements (which you can select via a relative XPath).

Kind regards

robert

To confirm I am following you correctly, I have now got the following:

info = doc.elements.to_a(“//UserData/List/ItemInfo/”)

Printing out info gives a line per line entry of all children under the
tag ItemInfo.

First of all, is this what you meant? Am I correct to assume that at
this point, you are suggesting I write this data to a CSV file stripping
off the tags with a regex or something? Is this correct?

Many thanks and apologies if I have misunderstood.

5

I managed to mess-up clicking “Send” on Friday, so I’m trying again (-:

6

Could anybody help me with an issue you I am having with some XML I am
reading. I am using xpath to read 2 different parts of an XML file,
which looks a lot like this

84 0 BLAH LAH 12345 NEXT ITEM AS BOVE

Then I have further data, which is slightly different
84

0

BLAH LAH 12345

As you can see, the tags are the same but the first is DoneList and the
second NotDoneList. I need to process each set seperately and each set
can contain more than 1 entry. My code to give a CSV file is

doc = REXML::Document.new(d) #call REXML to open the XML file
#To get NotDoneList data
doc.elements.each("//NotDoneList/Vector/Count/FullItemInfo") do |e|
detail =
(
e.elements[‘ItemInfo/Title’].text << “,” <<
e.elements[‘ItemInfo/Id’].text
)
puts detail
end

#To get DoneList data
doc.elements.each("//DoneList/Vector/Count/FullItemInfo") do |e|
detail =
(
e.elements[‘ItemInfo/Title’].text << “,” <<
e.elements[‘ItemInfo/Id’].text
)
puts detail
end

When I run this, no data in extracted and no errors are given. In
contrast if I do
doc.elements.each("//FullItemInfo") do |e|
I am able to extract all the information for both the NotDoneList and
DoneList, however this is not what I want. I want to address each data
set separately. The eventual idea will be to produce a report of all
items in the NotDoneList and another report for those in the DoneList.
I guess I am doing something wrong but I cannot see it.

Can anyone see what I am doing wrong with this? I would really
appreciate any help as I cannot figure it out.

Many thanks

7

NEXT ITEM AS BOVE
Data
DoneList
Vector
Count /Count
FullItemInfo
Count /Count
ItemInfo
Title /Title
Id /Id
/ItemInfo
/Vector
/DoneList
FullItemInfo

The XML example you provided seems to have mismatched tags?

NotDoneList
Vector
Count /Count
FullItemInfo
Count /Count
ItemInfo
Title /Title
Id /Id
/ItemInfo
/Vector
/DoneList
FullItemInfo
/Data

doc.elements.each("//NotDoneList/Vector/Count/FullItemInfo")
doc.elements.each("//DoneList/Vector/Count/FullItemInfo") do |e|

Can you verify and re-post a clean XML snippet? (That may help debug
your XPath.) I’m going to guess:

<Data>
    <DoneList>
        <Vector>
            <Count/>
            <FullItemInfo/>
        </Vector>
    </DoneList>
</Data>

In which case, the XPath might be: ‘//DoneList/Vector/FullItemInfo’?

8

My issue was due to the mis matched tags actually, it was a broken XML
file.

Thanks for identifying that.