From: Cody Robbins <cody@...>
Date: 2008-04-17T13:29:02+09:00
Subject: RSS::Parser only returns nil

I am trying to use RSS::Parser to parse an RSS feed, like so:

require 'rss'
require 'rss/parser'
RSS::Parser.parse(open('http://www.macrumors.com/macrumors.xml').read)

This works exactly as advertised on my development machine, but on the  
production machine RSS::Parser#parse only returns nil. Both machines  
are running the same versions of Ruby, and I diffed the rss/ lib  
directories on the two machines, and there are no differences (i.e.,  
they have the exact same copies of the RSS library code).

The problem is not arising from trying to read the data from a URL. In  
fact, nil is returned on the production machine whether the RSS is  
read from a URL, a file, or entered directly as a string in the parse  
call. The same nil result occurs with even a minimal RSS file.

I even copied the entire Ruby lib directory from the production  
machine to my development machine, and ran the code using that library  
code like so:

ruby -I/path/to/production/library/code -e "require 'rss' ; require  
'rss/parser' ; puts RSS::Parser.parse(open('http://www.macrumors.com/macrumors.xml').read).inspect 
";

It works fine on my development machine with the production library  
code.

This is driving me crazy and has wasted so much of my time. Why would  
RSS::Parser not be returning an error or some sort of indication of  
the problem? Why would it be working on one machine but not on another?

I'm using Ruby 1.8.5 (2006-12-25 patchlevel 12) on both machines. The  
development machine is running OS X 10.5, though, and the production  
machine is FreeBSD.

Thanks!
Cody