From: Mark Hubbart <discord@...>
Date: 2004-04-29T02:38:01+09:00
Subject: Re: rexml: how to get element type?


On Apr 28, 2004, at 5:19 AM, Sean Russell wrote:

> Mark Hubbart <discord@mac.com> wrote in message 
> news:<874825E2-96EA-11D8-9038-000502FDD5CC@mac.com>...
>> If I can jump in here... That last time I tried working with rexml, I
>> opened a medium sized xml file in irb. I created a new REXML::Document
>> IIRC, and it automatically inspected it, since it was the return 
>> value.
>
> Hm.  I do admit that #inspect on REXML objects is rather useless,
> unless you're doing debugging.  I used it quite a bit when I was first
> developing REXML.  I could truncate it and have it show something
> like:
>
> 	<elem attr='val'> ... </elem>
>
> Sort of a truncated XML representation.

That would be nice :) Basically, anything that would make it possible 
to use REXML normally in irb would be greatly appreciated.

If the full #inspect is necessary sometimes (I don't know), then 
perhaps there could be a verbosity level of some sort? So that it could 
be set like this:

   REXML.verbose_inspect = false

This would make it useful in irb. Looking over the output from a simple 
bit of xml, it looks like much could be done just by hiding a few 
instance variables and all grandchildren.

cheers,
--Mark