Question

Feels like I’m missing something pretty obvious here but can’t see it.

I have an XML file and are using the Nokogiri gem.

The XML looks like this (imagine if you will an infinite amount of ‘variants’):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
<products> 
    <variant> 
        <sku type="string">123abc</sku>
        <inventory-quantity type="integer">68</inventory-quantity> 
    </variant> 
    <variant> 
        <sku type="string">321cba</sku>
        <inventory-quantity type="integer">22</inventory-quantity> 
    </variant>
</products>

I want to loop over the variants and create a corresponding record for each that contains the ‘sku’ and ‘inventory-quantity’ attributes.

This is what I’ve got so far, but instead of creating individual records, in the above case it creates two records and inserts the complete array or NodeSet that Nokogiri returns into each records attribute. So this:

doc = Nokogiri::XML(File.open("#{Rails.root}/public/new.xml")) 

variant = doc.xpath("//variant")

variant.each do |product| 

  sku = product.xpath("//sku").text
  quan = product.xpath("//inventory-quantity").text

  Productmapping.create(:sku => sku, :product_quantity => quan)

end

creates this…

sku              inventory-quantity

123abc321cba     6822
123abc321cba     6822

Where I actually want:

sku              inventory-quantity

123ab            68
321cba           22

It looks like it’s because the xpath locator returns all occurrences into an array and I’m calling that array and inserting it for each record.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The answer is simple – instead of:

sku = product.xpath("//sku").text
quan = product.xpath("//inventory-quantity").text

just use:

sku = product.xpath("sku").text
quan = product.xpath("inventory-quantity").text

It’s because //sku selects all the sku descendants of the document root.