Question

I have a multi-dimensional array that I’d like to use for building an xml output.

The array is storing a csv import. Where people[0][…] are the column names that will become the xml tags, and the people[…>0][…] are the values.

For instance, array contains:
people[0][0] => first-name
people[0][1] => last-name
people[1][0] => Bob
people[1][1] => Dylan
people[2][0] => Sam
people[2][1] => Shepard

XML needs to be:
<person>
  <first-name>Bob</first-name>
  <last-name>Dylan</last-name>
</person>
<person>
  <first-name>Sam</first-name>
  <last-name>Shepard</last-name>
</person>

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Thanks to everyone that posted. Below is the solution that seems to work best for my needs. Hopefully others may find this useful.

This solution grabs a remote url csv file, stores it in a multi-dimensional array, then exports it as xml:

require 'rio'
require 'fastercsv'

url = 'http://remote-url.com/file.csv'
people = FasterCSV.parse(rio(url).read)

xml = ''
1.upto(people.size-1) do |row_idx|
  xml << "  <record>\n"
  people[0].each_with_index do |column, col_idx|
    xml << "    <#{column.parameterize}>#{people[row_idx][col_idx]}</#{column.parameterize}>\n"
  end
  xml << "  </record>\n"
end

There are better solutions out there, using hash.to_xml would have been great except I needed to change the csv index line to parameterize to use as a xml tag, but this code works so I’m happy.