New to Ruby and XML

Ruby
1

Hi all,

I have an API call to another database app that returns the XML below:

9 ISA 8
AAA 1 AAA
2 AAB
4 AAC
5 AAD 7
AAE 12 AAF
13 AAG

I’d like to loop through each of these records and create a hash. The
first value of each record being the key and the second being the value
in the hash.

Any ideas? Thank you for helping a noob!

-Hunter

2

On Mon, 2006-05-08 at 15:31 +0900, Hunter W. wrote:

5 AAD 7
AAE 12 AAF
13 AAG

I’d like to loop through each of these records and create a hash. The
first value of each record being the key and the second being the value
in the hash.

If you want to parse the XML you could do it with libxml-ruby
(http://libxml.rubyforge.org/), e.g.

require ‘xml/libxml’
d = XML::Parser.string(xml).parse
h = d.find(‘/records/record’).inject({}) do |h,n|
data = n.find(‘f’).to_a
h.merge!({data.first.content => data.last.content})
end

However, you don’t really need to iterate the records, assuming your XML
is structured just as above:

require ‘xml/libxml’
d = XML::Parser.string(xml).parse
h = Hash[*d.find(‘/records/record/f’).map { |n| n.content}]

This translates pretty easily to REXML if you don’t have libxml-ruby
installed:

require ‘rexml/document’
require ‘rexml/xpath’

d = REXML::Document.new(xml)
h = Hash[*REXML::XPath.match(d.root, ‘/records/record/f’).map { |n|
n.get_text }]

(Maybe that can be done better, I don’t know REXML too well I’m
afraid).

Hope that helps,