From: Peter Zotov <whitequark@...>
Date: 2009-03-26T02:52:03+09:00
Subject: Re: Parsing xml

Quoting "Arun Kumar" <arunkumar@innovaturelabs.com>:

> Peter Zotov wrote:
>> Quoting "Arun Kumar" <arunkumar@innovaturelabs.com>:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>> Is there any way in Ruby to parse an xml file without using REXML or any
>>> other libraries.
>>
>> Of course. You can write a finite state machine, read XML from file
>> and parse as you want.
>
> Thanks. Can u please give me details of it.

It is described nicely in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_state_machine

As a clue, I can recommend you define following states: "text",  
"opening tag", "tag attribute", "tag attribute value", "closing tag".  
E. g. when you are in "text" state and get "<" symbol at input  
sequence, you change state to "opening tag" or "closing tag"...
I still have one question: why you don't use REXML?

--
   WBR, Peter Zotov