xml-motor ~ what it is; how & why should you use it

xml-motor ~ what it is; why & how you should use it

Download this article as pdf on what,why,how
http://speakerdeck.com/u/abhishekkr/p/xml-motor-whatwhyhow-this-xml-parsing-rubygem#


or read it all here.....

Late 2011, I started with a new rubygem project for parsing xml, html content.
  @Rubygems: http://rubygems.org/gems/xml-motor
  @GitHub     : https://github.com/abhishekkr/rubygem_xml_motor

Just created it to test out my work at compact, quick & easy xml-parsing algorithm... can see that
  @Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/AbhishekKr/xmlmotor

So, currently this is a non-native, completely independent less-than-250 ruby-LOC available as a simple rubygem to be require-d and use in an easy freehand notation and match with any node attributes.

Current Features:

• Has a single method access to parse require xml nodes from content or file. Use it only if you are gonna parse that xml-content once. For using same xml-content more than once, follow the 3-way step mentioned in examples.
• It doesn't depend on presence of any other system library, purely non-native.
• It parses broken or corrupted xml/html content correctly, just for the content it have.
• Can parse results on looking for node-names, attributes of node or both.
• Uses free-freehand notation to retrieve desired xml nodes
  if your xml looks like,
  '<library>...
    <book> <title>ABC</title> <author>CBA</author> </book>...
    <book>
      <title>XYZ</title>
       <authors> <author>XY</author><author>YZ</author> </authors></book>...
  </library>'
  and you look for 'book.author',
  then, you'll get back ['CBA', 'XY', 'YZ'];
  what that means is the child-node could be at any depth in the parent-node.
• Default return mode is without the tags, there is a switch to get the nodes.
  as you'd have seen in above example:
  'CBA' gets sent by default, not 'CBA'
• To filter your nodes on the basis of attributes, single or multiple attributes can be provided.
• These attribute searches can be combined up with freehand node name searches.
• Readme (a bit weird): https://raw.github.com/abhishekkr/rubygem_xml_motor/master/README

Features To Come:

• Work on making it more performance efficient.
• Limit over result-nodes retrieved from start/end of matching nodes.
• Multi-node attribute-based filter for a hierarchical node search.
• Add dev-knows CSS Selector, it's already present using attribute based search... just need to add a mapping method.

EXAMPLES of usage:
example code to try: https://github.com/abhishekkr/axml-motor/tree/master/ruby/examples

• say, you have an xml file 'dummy.xml', with data as
  <dummy>
    <ummy>    <mmy class="sys">non-native</mmy>  </ummy>
    <ummy>
      <mmy class="sys">      <my class="sys" id="mem">compact</my>    </mmy>
    </ummy>
    <mmy type="user">    <my class="usage">easy</my>  </mmy></dummy>
• its available at rubygems.org, install it as
    $ gem install xml-motor
• include it in your ruby code,
    #!/usr/bin/env ruby
    require 'xml-motor'
• get the XML Filename and/or XML data available
    fyl = File.join(File.expand_path(File.dirname __FILE__),'dummy.xml')
    xml = File.open(fyl,'r'){|fr| fr.read }
• One-time XML-Parsing directly from file
    XMLMotor.get_node_from_file(fyl, 'ummy.mmy', 'class="sys"')
       Result: ["non-native", "\n      compact\n    "]
• One-time XML-Parsing directly from content
    XMLMotor.get_node_from_content xml, 'dummy.my', 'class="usage"'
       Result: ["easy"]
    
• Way to go for XML-Parsing for xml node searches
    xsplit = XMLMotor.splitter xml
    xtags  = XMLMotor.indexify xsplit
  
    [] just normal node name based freehand notation to search:
      XMLMotor.xmldata xsplit, xtags, 'dummy.my'
      Result: ["compact", "easy"]
    [] searching for values of required nodes filtered by attribute:
      XMLMotor.xmldata xsplit, xtags, nil, 'class="usage"'
      Result: ["easy"]
  
    [] searching for values of required nodes filtered by freehand tag-name notation & attribute:
      XMLMotor.xmldata xsplit, xtags, 'dummy.my', 'class="usage"'
      Result: ["easy"]
  
    [] searching for values of required nodes filtered by freehand tag-name notation & multiple attributes:
      XMLMotor.xmldata xsplit, xtags, 'dummy.my', ['class="sys"', 'id="mem"']
      Result: ["compact"]