From: darkelf3@...
Date: 2004-05-06T18:33:55+09:00
Subject: Re: XML Data Binding for Ruby ?

thanks a lot.

markus

Sean Russell wrote:

> Markus Jais <markusjais@yahoo.de> wrote in message
> news:<c78pel$11lbg$1@ID-75083.news.uni-berlin.de>...
>> with this I can take an XML document like this
> ...
>> and this python code
>> =============
>> #!/usr/bin/env python
>> 
>> import anobind
> 
> Here's something that'll do the job.  I just threw this together, so
> it is probably fragile, and it is one-way -- it only converts XML to
> Ruby objects.  But it implements the functionality that you described
> in the example you gave -- it does so in 25 lines of code, and took
> about as many minutes to write and test.  :-)  I'm sure it could be
> compressed and/or optimized; there were a number of solutions to
> choose from.
> 
> By the way, I personally believe that this class of XML-to-Objects
> mechanism has extremely limited use.  If you use real XML objects and
> XPath, you have access to a much broader set of XML documents, and it
> is often easier to work with -- especially with deeply nested XML.
> And if all you're looking for is serialization, there are a number of
> projects available; some, even, that generate XML -- albeit, not as
> clear of a 1-to-1 mapping as here.
> 
> For an example of where I expect the Python code to fail (and I *know*
> the Ruby code I've supplied will fail), given:
> 
> <a b="B1">
>   <b>B2</b>
>   <some-tag>TAG1</some-tag>
>   <another.tag>TAG2</another.tag>
>   <:tag>TAG3</:tag>
> </a>
> 
> How do you differentiate between @b and b?  Can you get any of the TAG
> text values?
> 
> Anyway, here's the Ruby version of the Python module.
> 
> ############## START CODE
> # A quasi-serialization class.  Accepts a limited subset of XML and
> turns it
> # into Ruby objects.
> require "rexml/document"
> 
> class XMLObject
>   def initialize element
>     @element = element
>     @methods = {}
>   end
>   def method_missing method
>     m_name = method.to_s
>     return @methods[m_name] if @methods[m_name]
>     el = REXML::XPath.match( @element, m_name )
>     case el.size
>       when 0
>         return @element.attributes[ m_name ]
>       when 1
>         @methods[ m_name ] = XMLObject.new( el[0] )
>       else
>