From: Peter Bailey <pbailey@...>
Date: 2007-09-25T21:54:19+09:00
Subject: Re: More information on REXML/XPath

Peter Bailey wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm trying to convert xml files to SGML. The publishing system at our
> company uses SGML. And, basically, the SGML I want to create is just
> CALS, which is the SGML tables standard. So, I'm trying to use REXML to
> parse the XML and delineate all of the necessary elements that need to
> be converted. And, I need to do some gathering and sorting. My client,
> an editor in my company, wants to pick the first from the list of a
> series of elements and use that as text for a heading in the final
> document.
> Here's a bit of the original. I've attached a sample XML file.
>   <registration>
>   ...
>   <issueList>
>   <issue code="ENG">Energy/Nuclear</issue>
>   <issue code="WAS">Waste (hazardous/solid/interstate/nuclear)</issue>
>   </issueList>
> Here's what I'm doing to just try and capture that first instance of
> <issue code>, which, in this case, is "Energy/Nuclear."
>   codes = XPath.match( doc, "//registration/issueList/issue code[1]" )
>   puts codes
> It's giving me ALL of the <issue code>s, no matter what I put there as a
> quantifier. I've tried "[1]", as shown. I've tried [0], first,
> [position()<2], but, the results all look the same. It just gives me the
> whole list, not the first entries I'm asking for.
> Thanks,
> Peter

Never mind. I think I got it. I'm obviously new to XML, so, I was 
confused about what's an element and what's an attribute. I did this and 
I'm getting closer:

codes = XPath.match( doc, "//registration/issueList/issue[1]/" )

Thanks, anyway.
-Peter

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