From: Chris White <cwprogram@...>
Date: 2011-07-30T05:57:15+09:00
Subject: Re: encoding problem




----------------------------------------
> Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2011 02:49:58 +0900
> From: trylobeet@gmail.com
> Subject: encoding problem
> To: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
>
> i'm new to ruby, and having got the basics by now i decided to try and
> write a program that fetches RSS feeds and mashes them up into a
> burroughs-style cut-up.

Here's an alternative that uses a simple xml parsing gem (xml-object), and the standard net/http library:

require 'net/http'
require 'xml-object'

def fetch(uri_str, limit = 10)
    # You should choose better exception.
    raise ArgumentError, 'HTTP redirect too deep' if limit == 0

    response = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(uri_str))
    case response
    when Net::HTTPSuccess     then response
    when Net::HTTPRedirection then fetch(response['location'], limit - 1)
    else
        response.error!
    end
end

xml_data = fetch("http://www.slashdot.org/index.rss").body

rss = XMLObject.new(xml_data)

puts rss.channel.title
puts rss.channel.link
puts rss.channel.description

rss.items.each do |item|
    puts item.title
    puts item.link
    puts item.description
end

The `fetch()` method is required because this URL redirects multiple times, which by the way the correct URL is:

http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot

xml-object lets you access xml as an object. More details on the homepage[1]. You might be able to get faster parsing by using libxml-ruby. This blog has a quick breakdown on performance[2]. I decided to go with xml-object simply because it matched more closely to how you were accessing it. Hope that gives you something to work with.

Regards,
Chris White
Twitter: @cwgem

[1] http://xml-object.rubyforge.org/doc/
[2] http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2008/08/11/parsing-xml-with-ruby/