From: Ross Bamford <rossrt@...>
Date: 2006-05-08T20:54:08+09:00
Subject: Re: new to Ruby and XML

On Mon, 2006-05-08 at 15:31 +0900, Hunter Walker wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have an API call to another database app that returns the XML below:
> 
> <records>        <record>          <f id='3'>9</f>          <f 
> id='8'>ISA</f>        </record>        <record>          <f id='3'>8</f> 
> <f id='8'>AAA</f>        </record>        <record>          <f 
> id='3'>1</f>          <f id='8'>AAA</f>        </record>        <record> 
> <f id='3'>2</f>          <f id='8'>AAB</f>        </record> 
> <record>          <f id='3'>4</f>          <f id='8'>AAC</f> 
> </record>        <record>          <f id='3'>5</f>          <f 
> id='8'>AAD</f>        </record>        <record>          <f id='3'>7</f> 
> <f id='8'>AAE</f>        </record>        <record>          <f 
> id='3'>12</f>          <f id='8'>AAF</f>        </record> 
> <record>          <f id='3'>13</f>          <f id='8'>AAG</f> 
> </record>      </records>
> 
> 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,
-- 
Ross Bamford - rosco@roscopeco.REMOVE.co.uk