From: Ben Giddings <bg-rubytalk@...>
Date: 2003-10-03T09:14:47+09:00
Subject: Re: xml + ruby = happy programmer

paul vudmaska wrote:
> I mean something like this...
> 
> #(presuming %x creates an xml literal.)
> x = %x{<m><l>is your friend</l></m>}
> 
> #access it like this...
> print x.m.l #>is your friend
> 
> as opposed to
> x = {'m'=>{'l'=>'is your friend'}}
> 
> print x['m']['l']#something like that.
> 
> I'm not a ruby guru and might not even be that good a
> programmer but i like the first better. Much.

How do you propose to handle an element like:

<xsl:import href="..."/>

The set of allowable characters in an XML element is larger than the set of 
allowable characters in a Ruby method name:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#NT-NameChar

As for x = %x{<m><l>is your friend</l></m>}

There was recently a long discussion on this list about new "percent letter 
brace" tricks.  I think the general feeling was that it was simpler to just 
create a method that takes a string as an argument and returns an XML element.

I don't know if there are any methods that do that, but how would you feel 
about:

x = XMLParser.parse "<m><l>is your friend</l></m>"

If that's too wordy, you could always say:

def xml(arg)
   XMLParser.parse(arg)
end

x = xml "<m><l>is your friend</l></m>"

Ben