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Asked: 2026-06-09T22:57:20+00:00

Basically questions says it all, how can I convert an xml file to yaml?

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Basically questions says it all, how can I convert an xml file to yaml?

I’ve tried this: 

require 'active_support/core_ext/hash/conversions'
require 'yaml'

file = File.open("data/mconvert.xml", "r")
hash = Hash.from_xml(file.read)
yaml = hash.to_yaml
File.open("data/mirador.yml", "w") { |file| file.write(yaml) }

But, I am getting an “Exception parsing” error. I thought that was because I had dashes in an xml tag name, so I replaced the dashes with dashcharacterr But that still didn’t work.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If we have a look at the XML 1.0 specification, we’ll see that start tags look like this:

    [40]    STag ::= '<' Name (S Attribute)* S? '>'

    and then elsewhere, we find the definition of Name:

    [4]     NameStartChar ::= ":" | [A-Z] | "_" | [a-z] | [#xC0-#xD6] | [#xD8-#xF6] | [#xF8-#x2FF] | [#x370-#x37D] | [#x37F-#x1FFF] | [#x200C-#x200D] | [#x2070-#x218F] | [#x2C00-#x2FEF] | [#x3001-#xD7FF] | [#xF900-#xFDCF] | [#xFDF0-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#xEFFFF]
[4a]    NameChar      ::= NameStartChar | "-" | "." | [0-9] | #xB7 | [#x0300-#x036F] | [#x203F-#x2040]

    You’ll notice that - is not in NameStartChar so this:

    <-vikings->1336162202</-vikings->

    is not valid XML and this part of your code:

    hash = Hash.from_xml(file.read)

    is failing because your file doesn’t contain XML, it contains text that looks like XML but isn’t quite real XML.

    Fix your data/mconvert.xml file to contain real XML and try again.

    If you try a simple experiment in the Rails console, you’ll see what’s going on:

    > Hash.from_xml('<-vikings->1336162202</-vikings->')
REXML::ParseException: #<REXML::ParseException: malformed XML: missing tag start
Line: 1
Position: 33
Last 80 unconsumed characters:
<-vikings->1336162202</-vikings->>

    notice the “malformed XML: missing tag start”?

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