From: Gavin Kistner <phrogz@...>
Date: 2011-09-06T13:30:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and XML

On Sep 5, 2011, at 10:21 PM, Gavin Kistner wrote:
> On Sep 5, 2011, at 5:42 PM, Bob Aiello wrote:
>> Essentially, I have hundreds of XML files like this one that contain
>> many many name value pairs. I am concerned that the value is defined
>> differently (actually I have seen this) in one or more of the XML. I
>> want to take an xml file and then parse the name/value pairs into a
>> list. Then I want to check that list against all of the other XML in the
>> system that have the same name/value pairs.
> 
>      # Find every <name> that has a <value> sibling
>      doc.xpath('//property/name[following-sibling::value]').each do |name|
>        value = name.at_xpath('following-sibling::value').text

Upon further reflection, I'd make one minor change to my code: instead of requiring that the name key always come first in the XML, the following tweak allows for the possibility of <property><value>…</value><name>…</name></property>:

# Find all name elements that are in properties that also have a <value> element
doc.xpath('//property[value]/name').each do |name|
  # Find the first 'value' child in the property (assumes only one)
  value = name.parent.at('value').text