From: Gavin Kistner <gavin@...>
Date: 2005-09-04T14:51:33+09:00
Subject: REXML bug - descendant-or-self selector

In XPath, "//" is an abbreviation for the "descendant-or-self"  
selector. My understanding (and Microsoft's XPath implementation) of  
this selector means that the following code should select the bar  
element as well as the descendants.

[Sliver:~/Desktop] gkistner$ cat tmp.rb
xml = <<ENDXML
<foo id="foo">
         <bar id="bar">
                 <jim id="jim" />
                 <jam id="jam" />
                 <bork><whee id="whee" /></bork>
         </bar>
</foo>
ENDXML

require 'rexml/document'
include REXML
bar = XPath.first( Document.new( xml ), '//bar' )
bar.each_element( './/[@id]' ){ |element_with_id|
         puts element_with_id
}


[Sliver:~/Desktop] gkistner$ ruby -v tmp.rb
ruby 1.8.2 (2004-12-25) [powerpc-darwin7.7.2]
<jim id='jim'/>
<jam id='jam'/>
<whee id='whee'/>