Rexml alternatives

Ruby
1

Hello,

I really like coding ruby or ruby on rails apps, but rexml often leads
to
frustration.

  • If I use xpath in watir-tests rexml takes plenty of time evaluating
    and
    execution time jumps from seconds to minutes.
  • Some rails apps I’ve written rely on rexml and xpath as well. I
    encountered strange xpath-results that mysteriously went away when
    upgrading ruby from 1.8.5 to 1.8.6.
    By that, rails apps using xpath developed on my laptop (Debian Lenny,
    Ruby
    1.8.6) might fail in production on servers running debian etch.

Since Ruby does support C/C++ bindings, I wonder if anyone have tried to
use
xerces instead (Googling for ruby-xerces shows a few posts but nothing
serious) or if there are any other alternatives to rexml.

Do you know any?
Thanks in advance,
Keep smiling
yanosz

2

You can try libxml-ruby, I hear it’s been rewritten and should be
working
pretty well now. Otherwise there’s hpricot, while not supporting real
XPATH,
can get you pretty far. But libxml-ruby will be faster.

3

On 13.09.2008 12:08, Jan L. wrote:

  • Some rails apps I’ve written rely on rexml and xpath as well. I
    encountered strange xpath-results that mysteriously went away when
    upgrading ruby from 1.8.5 to 1.8.6.

Did you investigate this? It may well be that there were bugs in 1.8.2
that have been removed in 1.8.6.

Kind regards

robert