Question

I am using rest-client to make restful API calls. My response can be either in JSON or XML.

How can I easily parse the responses? It is pulling Company and Contact information.

Is there a way to treat each XML record as an object, so I can access the tags as methods?

What is the recommended way to access and traverse the response I get back, and is it XML or JSON as the recommended format?

Answer 1

In the Readme of the ‘maintained’ github repo for the ruby version of rest-client, there is a section on handling results.

Are you calling two different APIs? I’m unsure of how one API would be both returning XML and/or JSON?

Personally, I’d make the call with rest-client (instead of net::http or something) and then use REXML to then parse the information I needed.

example (hypothetical with no code):

api_call = RestClient.get 'http://example.com/resource'
xml  = REXML::Document.new(api_call)
#parse xml here

For information on parsing with REXML check out this tutorial