# Rexml alternatives

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rexml-alternatives/148487>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [September 13, 2008, 12:48pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rexml-alternatives/148487 "2008-09-13T12:48:58Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![rbjl](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/7c8e57/32.png) [@rbjl](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/rbjl)\
**Post date:** [September 13, 2008, 12:48pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rexml-alternatives/148487/1 "2008-09-13T12:48:58Z")

</div>

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

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![rbjl](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/7c8e57/32.png) [@rbjl](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/rbjl)\
**Post date:** [September 13, 2008, 3:59pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rexml-alternatives/148487/2 "2008-09-13T15:59:47Z")

</div>

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.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![rbjl](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/7c8e57/32.png) [@rbjl](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/rbjl)\
**Post date:** [September 13, 2008, 6:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rexml-alternatives/148487/3 "2008-09-13T18:26:18Z")

</div>

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