Question

Alright I have an xml document that looks something like this:

    <xml>      <list>       <partner>        <name>Some Name</name>        <status>active</status>        <id>0</id>       </partner>       <partner>        <name>Another Name</name>        <status>active</status>        <id>1</id>       </partner>     </list>    </xml> 

I am using ruby’s lib-xml to parse it. I want to find if there is a partner with the name ‘Some Name’ in a quick and ruby idiomatic way.

How can I do this in one line or ruby code, assuming i have a the document parsed in a variable named document.. Such that i can call document.find(xpath) to retrieve nodes. I have had to do this multiple times in slightly different scenarios and now its starting to bug me.

I know i can do the following (but its ugly)

 found = false  document.find('//partner/name').each do |name|   if (name.content == 'Some Name')    found = true    break   end  end  assert(found, 'Some Name should have been found') 

but i find this really ugly. I thought about using the enumeration include? mixin method but that still won’t work because I need to get the .content field of each node as opposed to the actual node… While writing this, I though of this (but it seems somewhat inefficient albeit elegant)

found = document.find('//partner/name').collect{|name| name.content}.member?('Some Name') 

Are there any other ways of doing this?

Answer 1

What about this?

found = document.find('//partner[name='Some Name']').empty?