From: Tomasz Wegrzanowski <tomasz.wegrzanowski@...>
Date: 2006-08-06T19:52:28+09:00
Subject: Re: magic/xml library for easy XML processing

On 8/6/06, Zed Shaw <zedshaw@zedshaw.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-08-05 at 10:17 +0900, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > 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"
> > }
> >
>
> I'd like to have it work like Hpricot as well:
>
> (doc/:entry/:link).each do {|c|
> ...
> }
>
> Especially considering you overload [] to get attributes, why not / to
> get children?

Basically because there are three reasonable things to with node[:foo]:
* return attribute :foo
* return the first child with tag :foo
* return list of children with tag :foo
Ruby is not Perl, so we cannot have both 2 and 3 folded into one,
and doing only second or only third doesn't sound that convincing ;-)

Another issue is that I'd have to overload Array#/ to get
(doc/:entry/:link) working,
and that would have much higher mental cost than adding long-named
method like #children to it. Or use something else than an Array
for sequences of XML nodes (hpricot does so with Hpricot::Elements),
but that wouldn't be nice. I'll look at it again after I have all W3C
XQuery Use Cases recoded :-)

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