Using XmlSimple to parse XML strings

Rails
1

I am using XmlSimple to parse an XML string received from a remote
host. I am getting the error message, “File does not exist: .”. I am
fairly well convinced that the problem is that XmlSimple is not
recognizing the received XML string as being valid XML and is
therefore looking for a file by that name (which, of course, does not
exist). The XmlSimple documentation says that it recognizes an XML
string by the presence of ‘<’ and ‘>’ characters. I interpret that to
mean that XmlSimple does not perform any sort of exhaustive XML
validity check; but, rather just looks for the presence of those
opening and closing characters to make the determination. The
received string meets that requirement. Any suggestions on what I
might do?

Thanks for any input.

      ... doug
2

I wanted the list to know that I resolved this issue. My problem
related to my poor understanding of sockets (but I’m learning). I
didn’t realize that reading from a socket is destructive. That is
(apparently) once the data is read from the socket, it is gone. In a
backhanded sort of way, that is what was causing my problem. Thanks.

     ... doug