From: Bob Hutchison <hutch@...>
Date: 2006-08-01T21:20:42+09:00
Subject: Re: humanized Xml tree navigation

Hi,

On Jul 31, 2006, at 11:16 AM, Tim Bray wrote:

> On Jul 31, 2006, at 6:16 AM, chiaro scuro wrote:
>
>> What I need to do is to be able to traverse an xml document as in:
>>
>> * people.each_person {...}
>> * people.person[2].name
>> * people.person.name              #takes the first person
>> * people.person.size
>
> Consider
>
> <vocab-item>
>   <first.form>foo</first.form>
>   <second.form>f��</second.form>
> </vocab-item>
>
> That's legal XML.  Ruby n00b question: can you work around problems  
> like "vocab-item" and "first.form" in Ruby?  -Tim


I feel *compelled* to mention xampl (<http://rubyforge.org/projects/ 
xampl/>). Using the current version for ruby, the program looks like  
this:

thing = open("xml/funnystuff.xml"){ | f | XamplObject.from_xml_string  
f.read }
puts thing.pp_xml
puts thing.class.name
thing.first_form.first.content = 'hello there'
puts thing.pp_xml

The output like this:

<vocab-item>
   <first.form>foo</first.form>
   <second.form>f��</second.form></vocab-item>
XamplAdHoc::VocabItem

<vocab-item>
   <first.form>hello there</first.form>
   <second.form>f��</second.form></vocab-item>

The file xml/funnystuff.xml has Tim's example xml in it.

The XamplAdHoc stuff is there because there is no namespace  
declarations in the xml and I didn't supply a default mapping to a  
Ruby Module.


Xampl does a lot more than this (in particular it does a weak- 
transactional 'transparent' persistence kind of thing). It has been  
around in Java since the late 1990s (where it does 'real'  
transactions', CommonLisp for a couple of years, and Ruby for 18  
months. I've written several programs well over 500 kloc using the  
Java version. Currently using xampl in place of ActiveRecord in a  
Rails project I'm working on (but you need the version I'm preparing  
to release for use with Rails, so please be patient).


Cheers,
Bob

>

----
Bob Hutchison                  -- blogs at <http://www.recursive.ca/ 
hutch/>
Recursive Design Inc.          -- <http://www.recursive.ca/>
Raconteur                      -- <http://www.raconteur.info/>
xampl for Ruby                 -- <http://rubyforge.org/projects/xampl/>