From: Sean Russell <ser@...>
Date: 2001-11-14T05:10:20+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:25061] RE:  REXML Question (Re: XML libraries (Re:  Re: ruby and webser vices))

Ben Schumacher wrote:

> However, when I create the element with REXML it ends up being closed:

How have you seen this done in other XML toolkits?

REXML closes tags, because any call to Element.write (should) produce a 
valid XML document.  This requires that all tags be closed.

Specifically, REXML will *read* documents in a stream, but it won't create 
them that way; internally, all REXML documents that are programmatically 
created are document trees.

> <stream:stream xmlns='jabber:client' to='jabber.com'
> xmlns:stream='http://etherx.jabber.org/streams'/>
> 
> I figure I could probably work around this easily enough by writing the
> output to a string and then removing the slash, but I was wondering if
> somebody else had a better solution? (I could, of course, build the entire
> opening element manually and not use REXML, but I'd prefer not to do
> this.)

Hmmm.  Interesting problem.  If the stream is one large document on a 
single socket, it might be easier to hand-craft the opening tag (it isn't 
complicated, is it?) and then use the XML toolkit to generate the 
individual tags, closing the <stream:stream> tag at the end by hand.

I could provide a solution in REXML by providing a Element.start_tag() and 
Element.end_tag() methods, but I'm hesitant to complicate the API if this 
is a single-use (or extremely rare) need.

I'm open to suggestions.

-- 
--- SER