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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-22T11:29:05+00:00

Clearly I need to (a) convert both strings to canonical XML or (b) compare

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Clearly I need to (a) convert both strings to canonical XML or (b) compare their parse-trees. The following doesn’t work because the document object returned doesn’t have a sensible == defined.

Nokogiri.XML(doc_a) == Nokogiri.XML(doc_b)

Nor does the following, because Nokogiri’s to_xml leaves some internal whitespace:

Nokogiri.XML(doc_a).to_xml == Nokogiri.XML(doc_b).to_xml

This is a reasonable approximation of equality (and will work for most cases), but it’s not quite right:

Nokogiri.XML(doc_a).to_xml.squeeze(' ') == Nokogiri.XML(doc_b).to_xml.squeeze(' ')

I’m already using Nokogiri, so I’d prefer to stick with it, but I’ll use whatever library works.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you are looking for structural equality and don’t care about the order of tags and attributes, probably the xml-simple library is a good choice. It converts the xml into ruby’s data structures (hashes and lists) which can be safely compared with the == operator.

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