# To\_xml repeating elements and plain strings **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [March 8, 2010, 2:43pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/to-xml-repeating-elements-and-plain-strings/184777 "2010-03-08T14:43:49Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![harry-weeds](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/65b543/32.png) [@harry-weeds](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/harry-weeds)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2010, 2:43pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/to-xml-repeating-elements-and-plain-strings/184777/1 "2010-03-08T14:43:49Z")
Say I want to output XML like this: 123 apple banana pear lemon Is there a way of doing that with to\_xml? It seems like there’s two problems: to\_xml always creates a wrapping element when it encounters an array, and… You can put plain strings into hash values and it works, but plain strings in arrays doesn’t work. That’s this guy’s problem again [Array to\_xml - Rails - Ruby-Forum](http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/167577) . Maybe I should look at using Builder instead. Seems it gives me power over the XML output, but my code builds up a nested hash/array structure. Dont I end up embedding knowledge of that structure in two different places. Also from my hash I wanted to generate JSON too. Is there an approach converting from an XML doc object to JSON? or some other way I should be thinking about this? ---
**Author:** ![harry-weeds](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/65b543/32.png) [@harry-weeds](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/harry-weeds)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2010, 12:40pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/to-xml-repeating-elements-and-plain-strings/184777/2 "2010-03-17T12:40:09Z")
I noticed some sections in the “Agile Web Developement with Rails” book: " Autogenerating the XML In the previous examples, we generated the XML responses by hand, using the builder template. That gives us control over the order of the elements returned. But if that order isn’t important, we can let Rails generate the XML for a model object for us by calling the model’s to\_xml method. … Note that by default to\_xml dumps everything out. You can tell it to exclude certain attributes, but that can quickly get messy. If you have to generate XML that meets a particular schema or DTD, you’re probably better off sticking with builder templates. " So that confirms what I’m finding, that to\_xml isn’t too great for tight control of your output. Builder is better. But does anyone know of a best-of-both-worlds approach? I want JSON as an alternate output, so it seems to make sense to create a hash structure mirroring the desired output structure, but then for the XML I’d need to unpack and re-pack the same structure within my builder definition.