Question

I coded a little Ruby script that would parse a remote XML file and extract some data from it using Nokogiri. Now I’m trying to code a more advanced version as a Rails application.

I have my code inside of a controller. It’s similar to the code that I used in my Ruby script, however it’s not working. I believe the error is because it’s trying to load the XML locally rather then externally.

Here is the error that Rails is giving me:

No such file or directory - http://mal-api.com/anime/10?format=xml

Here is a sample of the code in my controller: (I can provide the whole thing if needed, but it’s mainly just the default Rails scaffold code.)

def create
 require 'nokogiri'
 @anime = Anime.new(params[:anime])

 doc = Nokogiri::XML(open("http://mal-api.com/anime/#{@anime.mal_id}?format=xml"))

 #Title
 title = doc.css("anime english_title").inner_html
 #Snipped rails scaffold code
end

mal_id is passed in through a form. Nokogiri is added in my Gemfile.

Is there something I’m missing or that I’ve done wrong?
Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

By default the open method in ruby is used to open files. If you want to directly open an URL you need to require 'open-uri'. More information can be found in the docs: http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.3/libdoc/open-uri/rdoc/OpenURI.html