LibXML-To-Hash

The libxml-to-hash gem provides a thin layer between libxml and the Ruby world. It exports a method Hash#from_libxml which takes a string argument containing XML and returns a newly created hash that contains the XML in a parsed form.

Installation

Without bundler, do:

gem install libxml-to-hash

With bundler add

gem 'libxml-to-hash', :git => "https://github.com/johannesthoma/libxml-to-hash"

to Gemfile and do

bundle install

to install the gem.

You can omit the s in https if https should not work on your site.

Usage

First, do a:

require 'libxml_to_hash'

Then,

h = Hash.from_libxml("Content")

will return a hash:

{"root" => {"node" => "Content"}}

which is simpler than the output from libxml itself.

The hash format

Keys are always strings. Values might be one of the following:

• Strings (when there is only text content)
• Arrays (where there is more than one subnode like in xy
• LibxmlToHash::XmlNodes if both content and attributes are given.

See the unit test file for examples.

Iterables

All objects that serve as values respond to iterable, which returns an object that repsonds to each (actually an Array). That is a for loop for those object will always work. Suppose you have

h = Hash.from_libxml("Content")

Then

for f in h["root"]["node"].iterable do

works even though there is only one node object (if there were more than one, the value is an Array anyway). This is a convenience method that is very handy, because there is no need to look at the class of the value object when more than one is possible.

to_libxmlnode method

The to_libxmlnode method is defined for Hash and String.

Use this if you are not sure if the object may be either a String/Hash or LibXmlNode (both text and subnodes are given) to convert the String/Hash to a LibXmlNode.

Why not use Hash#from_xml?

This uses ReXML which is (at least the version we use) about 50 times slower than libxml.

Known bugs

Currently attributes in the root node are not reported.

The xml_node_to_hash helper method shouldn't be in the Hash class. There might be name clashes with other methods.

Authors

This gem was written by Johannes Thoma johannes.thoma@gmx.at based on work of Kristof Klee and a Stackoverflow posting.