From: djberg96@... (Daniel Berger)
Date: 2004-09-04T00:30:17+09:00
Subject: Re: rexml help

James Britt <jamesUNDERBARb@neurogami.com> wrote in message news:<41380BDD.4040905@neurogami.com>...
> Daniel Berger wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > 
> > Given a name, I want to be able to grab the login and password.  Or,
> > given both a name and a login, I want to be able to find the password.
> >  In the event I am only given a name, and there is more than one entry
> > with that name, I want the first entry (from a top down perspective).
> > 
> > What is the shortest route to accomplish this with rexml?  I've been
> > futzing around with each, each_element, root, get_text - but I'm just
> > not quite getting the hang of it.
> > 
> 
> 
> Play with this::
> 
> #------------------------------------------------------------
> class REXML::Document
>    def login_details( name )
>      ary = self.elements.to_a( "//name[text()='#{name}']" )
>      parent  = ary[0].parent
>      login = parent.elements.to_a( "login" )[0].text
>      pwd = parent.elements.to_a( "password" )[0].text
>      [login, pwd ]
>    end
> end
> 
> doc = REXML::Document.new( xml )
> 
> puts( doc.login_details( 'bar' ).inspect )
> puts( doc.login_details( 'foo' ).inspect )
> 
> #------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> REXML + XPath is your friend.  Basically, use XPath to select the 
> node(s) you want.  Then get the parent node.  Then use XPath again to 
> get additional child nodes from that (parent) node.
> 
> 
> James

Thank you James.

I have a followup issue.  There are some attributes that are optional,
such as "interval".  If I try to use XPath in this fashion..

interval = parent.elements.to_a( "interval" )[0].text

...and the "interval" node doesn't exist, it's going to raise a
NoMethodError.  I *could* just rescue and ignore that error, but that
doesn't seem very clean.  Is there a better way?  Or do I simply tell
people they must include the optional tags, even if they're empty?

Dan