From: Phrogz <gavin@...>
Date: 2007-03-23T01:55:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Pulling text from elements with REXML

On Mar 22, 10:44 am, Paul Willis <i...@paulwillis.com> wrote:
> One more thing, given an XML document...
>
> <root><kid stuff="some-other-text">hello world</kid></root>
>
> What would be the path to the attribute 'stuff' and return
> 'some-other-text'?

require 'rexml/document'
include REXML
doc = Document.new( <<ENDDOC )
<root>
  <kid stuff="some-other-text">hello world</kid>
  <kid class="best" stuff="gibbles">hello world</kid>
</root>
ENDDOC

att = XPath.first( doc, '//kid/@stuff' )
p att, att.class, att.value
#=> stuff='some-other-text'
#=> REXML::Attribute
#=> "some-other-text"

p XPath.first( doc, '//kid[@class="best"]/@stuff' ).value
#=> "gibbles"

I don't know what the XPath syntax is to select the value of an
attribute directly. I'd be interested to know if someone else knows it.