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Reading in XML in Ruby with xmlsimple

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2016-05-18 20:56:28 - Graham Ellis

The xmlsimple Ruby gem allows you to load in a file (or IO handle object or string) of XML as a multidimensional collection - hashes of arrays of hashes. There's a sample program here which includes this code to load the data from after __END__:

  require 'xmlsimple'
  info = XmlSimple.xml_in(DATA)

If I now the structure of what I'm getting, I can then access elements directly, for example:

  p info["access"][0]["where"][0]

and if I don't know what the structure is, I can use Ruby to explore it. The source code at the link above contains a complete recursive piece of code for displaying a Hash that contains hashes, arrays and printable values to get you started!

There's an example using the alternative (standard) rexml library - [here].