From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2004-04-26T04:11:26+09:00
Subject: Re: rexml: how to get element type?

Mark Hubbart wrote:
> something useful would be a small list of attributes, the number of 
> children, etc...  just as long as it's no more than several lines of 
> text. :) I credit my irb experience with rexml as the reason I still 
> don't know how to use it.

Something I've found useful before in writing inspect methods for 
hierarchical (but not XML) data is to have a depth argument to inspect, 
with a default of 0. The depth is passed on to sub-things, after 
decrementing. A depth of nil means you want to see the whole tree. Since 
the default is 0, using p and irb just give you the top-level stuff, 
whatever that means. For XML, maybe this would be, as Mark suggests, the 
attributes and number of children. When you want more depth, you can 
request it.