Question

I have searched endlessly for a solution to this and I thought i had solved it when I got an image to display. However the thumbnail was only the one stored in the root element. Quite simply this works:

rss = Nokogiri::XML(open('http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml'))
@news = rss.xpath('//item').map do |i|
  {
    'title'       => i.xpath('title').text, 
    'link'        => i.xpath('link').text, 
    'description' => i.xpath('description').text,
    'thumbnail'   => i.xpath('//media:thumbnail').attr('url')
  }
end

But editing the media:thumbnail to reference that item seems to break it:

{
  'title'       => i.xpath('title').text, 
  'link'        => i.xpath('link').text, 
  'description' => i.xpath('description').text,
  'thumbnail'   => i.xpath('media:thumbnail').attr('url')
}

I don’t understand why as both elements are identical. Any pointers in the right direction would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Your code breaks at the first element that doesn’t have a thumbnail child element. Try this:

@news = rss.xpath('//item').map do |i|
  thumb = i.at_xpath('media:thumbnail').attr('url') if i.at_xpath('media:thumbnail')
  {
    'title' => i.at_xpath('title').text, 
    'link' => i.at_xpath('link').text, 
    'description' => i.at_xpath('description').text,
    'thumbnail' => thumb
  }
end

Now thumbnail will either be the URL if it exists or nil if it doesn’t.