Question

I have the following XML consumed from a REST API:

<dataitems>
  <dataitem colour="null">
     <value>
        <label>Intel</label>
        <count>43</count>
     </value>
     <value>
        <label>AMD</label>
        <count>39</count>
     </value>
     <value>
        <label>ARM</label>
        <count>28</count>
     </value>
  </dataitem>
</dataitems>

I would like to search for the text in the <label> tag and display the matching value for <count> in a table.

In the controller I have: @post_count = Nokogiri::XML(Post.item_data.to_xml).

In the view I’m not sure whether I need to use @post_count.xpath or @post_count.search.

Can someone please point me in the right direction on the right method and syntax for it?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Although I’m not sure what information you are looking for, I have a few suggestions.

1) If you know the value in the element before you do your searching:

doc = Nokogiri.XML(open(source_xml))

# Assuming there is only one of each label
node = doc.xpath('//label[text()="Intel"]').first
count = node.next_element.text

# or if there are many of each label
nodes = doc.xpath('//label[text()="Intel"]')
nodes.each {|node|
  count = node.next_element.text
  # do something with count here
}

2) Assuming that you don’t know the names within the tag in advance

doc = Nokogiri.XML(open(source_xml))
labels = {}
doc.xpath('//label').each {|node|
  labels[node.text] = node.next_element.text
}

# labels => {"Intel"=>"43", "AMD"=>"39", "ARM"=>"28"}

I personally like the second solution better because it gives you a clean hash, but I prefer to work with hashes and arrays as quickly as possible.