Question

XML Data:

<configs>
<config>
<name>XP</name>
<browser>IE</browser>
<browser>FF</browser>
<browser>Chrome</browser>
</config>
</configs>

I’m new to Ruby, Nokogiri, and programming in general. I’m trying to write a QA tool to help with automation.

Ruby code:

doc = Nokogiri::XML(open("configs.xml"))
configs = doc.xpath("//configs/config").map do |i|
  {'name' => i.xpath('name').to_s, 'browsers' => i.xpath('browser').to_s}
end

configs.each do |i|
  puts i['name']
  puts i['browsers']
end

This does what I want it to, it returns the data, but includes the XML tags. Is there a way to strip them that I’m just not finding?

Answer 1

Use .text to get text node data:

:name => i.xpath('name').text

.to_s is the string representation of an XML node, which is more than you’re looking for.

However, the rest of your code is a bit broken if you’re expecting individual browser entries.

As-is it’ll smash the text data together into a single blob. Instead join them together, etc, for example:

configs = doc.xpath("//configs/config").collect do |cfg|
  browsers = cfg.xpath('browser').collect { |b| b.text }.join(', ')
  { name: cfg.xpath('name').text, browsers: browsers }
end

configs.each do |i|
  puts i[:name]
  puts i[:browsers]
end

_{You may want a blob of "IEFFChrome", in which case never mind.}