From: Tomasz Wegrzanowski <tomasz.wegrzanowski@...>
Date: 2006-08-05T10:17:05+09:00
Subject: magic/xml library for easy XML processing

Hello,

Some of you may be interested in a new library for XML processing.
It is inspired by languages designed just for XML-processing like CDuce
and to some extend by Perl's XML::Twig. Basically easy things
should be easy, and everything should be integrated very tightly
with Ruby.

The code and (rather incomplete) documentation
are here -> http://zabor.org/taw/magic_xml/

A few examples, so you can quickly see whether you're interested or not :-)

Parse ATOM feed for my blog and prints post titles and URLs:

doc = XML.from_url "http://t-a-w.blogspot.com/atom.xml"
doc.children(:entry).children(:link) {|c|
   print "#{c[:title]}\n#{c[:href]}\n\n" if c[:rel] == "alternate"
}

Get my del.icio.us posts about magic/xml and format them
as a XHTML list (for magic/xml's website):

deli_passwd = File.read("/home/taw/.delipasswd").chomp
url = "http://taw:#{deli_passwd}@del.icio.us/api/posts/recent?tag=taw+blog+magicxml"
XML.from_url(url).children(:post).reverse.each_with_index {|p,i|
   print XML.li("#{i+1}. ", XML.a({:href => p[:href]}, p[:description]))
}

Extract articles and IDs from a Wikipedia dump. It keeps only
small fragments in memory, but provides all convenient access
methods (works like XML::Twig, but with much nicer interface):

XML.parse_as_twigs(STDIN) {|node|
  next unless node.name == :page
  node.complete!
  t = node.children(:title)[0].contents
  i = node.children(:id)[0].contents
  print "#{i}: #{t}\n"
}

More about stream processing with magic/xml at
http://t-a-w.blogspot.com/2006/08/xml-stream-processing-with-magicxml.html

The most important thing to do would be to find cases
where other libraries are more expressive than magic/xml
and fix these cases if possible :-) As I don't know half
of the other libraries, and you certainly do, I need your help here :-)

And I guess I should also add XPath, port to a faster XML parser (currently
using REXML to get a stream of XML parse events), and add
some interface for accessing fancy XML features like
processing instructions to get it out of alpha :-)

-- 
Tomasz Wegrzanowski [ http://t-a-w.blogspot.com/ ]