Question

What I’m trying to do is read the value for all the nodes in this XML and put them into an array. This should be simple but for some reason it’s driving me nuts.

XML

<ArrayOfAddress>
<Address>
<AddressId>297424fe-cfff-4ee1-8faa-162971d2645f</AddressId>
<FirstName>George</FirstName>
<LastName>Washington</LastName>
<Address1>123 Main St</Address1>
<Address2>Apt #611</Address2>
<City>New York</City>
<State>NY</State>
<PostalCode>10110</PostalCode>
<CountryCode>US</CountryCode>
<EmailAddress>[e-mail]</EmailAddress>
<PhoneNumber>5555551234</PhoneNumber>
<AddressType>CustomerAddress</AddressType>
</Address>
</ArrayOfAddress>

Code

class MassageRepsone
def parse_resp
    @@get_address.url_builder #URL passed through HTTPClient - @@resp is the xml above
      doc = Nokogiri::XML::Reader(@@resp)
      @@values = doc.each do |node|
         node.value
    end
end

    @@get_address.parse_resp
    obj = [@@values] 
    Array(obj)
    p obj
end

The code snippet from above returns the following:

297424fe-cfff-4ee1-8faa-162971d2645f


George


Washington


123 Main St


Apt #622


New York


NY


10110


US


test.test.com


5555551234


CustomerAddress

I tried putting @@values to a string and applying chomp but that just prints the newlines as nil and puts quotes around the values. Not sure what the next step is or if I need to approach this differently with Nokogiri.

Answer 1

Your problem is that this code…

@@values = doc.each do |node|
  node.value
end

…calls node.value on each node, but then doesn’t do anything with the result. Array#each returns the array that was iterated, and that’s what you are setting @@values to. But doc.each doesn’t have all the nodes in the document.

Perhaps you want:

# Find all text nodes and extract them individually
@values = doc.xpath('//text()').map{ |node| node.text }

It’s hard to be sure because you don’t explain what the array ought to look like in the end. Perhaps you want:

@addresses = doc.css('Address').map do |address|
  address.xpath( './/text()' ).map{ |node| node.text }
end

…which would give you an array of one array for each <Address> element, filled with the values in that element.