From: Aleksi <foobar@...>
Date: 2005-04-11T21:54:38+09:00
Subject: Re: groovy-like xml selection

Robert Klemme wrote:
> "Luke Graham" <spoooq@gmail.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
> 
>>Hi list,
>>
>>Ive taken a quick look at groovy for the first time, and saw an
>>
>><foo>
>>  <bar>
>>    <jim age="1"/>
>>    <joe age="2"/>
>>  </bar>
>>  <bar/>
>></foo>
>>
>>foo.bar.star.select { |it| it[@age] == "1" && it.parent.name == "bar"
>>&& it.star.count == 0 }
>>
> 
> 
> REXML comes pretty close.  I'm sure with a small addition like this one
> you get pretty far:
> 
> class REXML::Element
>   def method_missing(sym,*a,&b)
>     elements[sym.to_s] or super
>   end
> end
> 
> Maybe you should add this to module REXML::Node.

I said a week ago about this simple REXML wrapup:
 
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/browse_frm/thread/f4e64a6983199c70/c3b1b15741232e9a?q=comp.lang.ruby+simplexml&rnum=1#c3b1b15741232e9a

I'm not sure this is what you meant, but thought to point to it anyway.

Effectively you can write code like given in example
at http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kaniemel/SimpleXML/doc/

    xml = SimpleXML.load(xml_string)  # or File
    puts xml.movie[0].plot            # => "\n    Whether you..."

 >>Im sure someones done the xml->object (method in this case) thing, but
 >>has the native path trick been tried in ruby yet?

I'm not sure what you mean with native path trick. But if that's being 
able to write xml.foo which finds a correct branch in DOM tree and 
allows one to continue with that branch, yes this module already 
implements it over REXML.

I have currently no plans to go forward with it, but I've been pondering 
if there should be generic API for accessing and modifying and 
underlying implementations over whatevery DOM traversal API is present 
be it REXML or any of the 15 libraries out there :).

     - Aleksi