From: Rich Kilmer <rich@...>
Date: 2001-11-16T04:52:25+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:25326] Re: ANN: REXML 1.1a3 (pre-encoded strings)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Julian Fitzell [mailto:julian-ml@beta4.com]
> Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2001 2:41 PM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: [ruby-talk:25325] Re: ANN: REXML 1.1a3
> 
> [ . . . ]
> 
> Hmm... what if I want to actually include the text &#100; ? I 
> admit it's not very common unless you are talking about XML 
> itself... but again this requires the user to know something 
> about the encoding, otherwise they may be surprised when that 
> part is not encoded... I wonder if it would be better to use a 
> different method if you want text not to be escaped?  I'm not 
> sure myself so I'm just throwing the idea out there.
> 
> Julian

What about defining a module as a "tag" and then using the obj.extend(module) 
method to extend your String before passing it in.

Module XMLEncoded
end

text = "you encode &amp; as &amp;amp;"

element.text = text.extend(XMLEncoded)

then the text is not encoded if (text.kind_of? XMLEncoded)==true

That way no further parameters need to be defined, just "type checking"
and it could speed up the processing because its pre-encoded.

-rich