XML::Smart - A Ruby class for fast and simple XML access

Copyright © 2004-2012 Jürgen Mangler <[email protected]>

Ruby/XML/Smart is freely distributable according to the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (see the file ‘COPYING’).

This program is distributed without any warranty. See the file ‘COPYING’ for details.

Installation

  • Based on Nokogiri 1.5.5

  • Thus works for MRI ruby 1.8.7, 1.9.x, JRuby (basically everything that is Nokogiri ready)

  • Works on Linux, OSX, Windows

Features

Principle of least surprise]

  • Nokogiri is messy - violence always is

  • libxml smells like old-school C-Binding ;-)

  • rex is … strange

Inherits Nokogiris GREAT compatibility for platforms and Ruby interpreters

XML only] - sorry, no css selectors, html, … go to Nokogiri if you look for these

Great and convenient namespace support, compared to everything else out there

  • use namespaces in xpaths without any additional work

    doc = XML::Smart.string(‘<test xmlns:aaa=“uri:aaa”><aaa:test/></test>’) doc.find(‘string(aaa:test)’) doc.close

  • register your own shortcusts to be available in all XPaths

    doc = XML::Smart.string(‘<test xmlns:aaa=“uri:aaa”><aaa:test/></test>’) doc.register_namespace :a, ‘uri:aaa’ doc.find(‘string(aaa:test)’) doc.close

NFS safe file locking while editing / reading from an XML file

XML::Smart.modify("EXAMPLE.xml","<test><names/></test>") { |doc|
 doc.root.add("test_node")
}

Changes since 0.2.x (see Changelog)

  • qname instead of name

  • #register_namespace instead of #namespaces= to register shortcuts

  • no more namespaces for #find necessary, all namespaces in document are automatically available.

  • signals removed

  • pull parser removed

Documentation

Sorry, no inline code documentation yet. We have an extensive test suite, look for examples there for now.