REXML Question

[mike leonard]

I'm looking at REXML as a possible alternative to some things I've been
doing with XSLT, but I haven't the foggiest notion of how to accomplish
even the simplest transformations. Using REXML, how would I go about,
say, translating all <em>'s into <emph>'s, or all <chapter>'s into <div
type="chapter">'s?

Thank you kindly in advance,

Mike

 

[James Britt]

I'm looking at REXML as a possible alternative to some things I've been
doing with XSLT, but I haven't the foggiest notion of how to accomplish
even the simplest transformations. Using REXML, how would I go about,
say, translating all <em>'s into <emph>'s, or all <chapter>'s into <div
type="chapter">'s?

Have you tries brute-force regexp?

If that isn't a suitable option, use the stream or pull parser to
traverse the document and do the substitution as each element is
encountered.

There should be an article on this topic coming up in Dr. Dobbs, but it
may not appear for a month or so.



James


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[Phlip]

I'm looking at REXML as a possible alternative to some things I've been
doing with XSLT, but I haven't the foggiest notion of how to accomplish
even the simplest transformations. Using REXML, how would I go about,
say, translating all <em>'s into <emph>'s, or all <chapter>'s into <div
type="chapter">'s?

Thank you kindly in advance,

REXML is a DOM-style parser, not a transformer.

To do what you said, off the top of my head I would ...

doc = Document.new(File.read('some.xml'))
XPath.each(doc, '//em') do
|node|
node.name = 'emph' # or similar; check the members first
end
doc.write(File.open(''another.xml')) # or similar to write

There; a transformation in a bottle. Because XPath.each() returns the actual
DOM nodes inside the parsed tree, and because writing on these nodes changes
that tree, you can loop thru the nodes and manipulate them using clever
XPath expressions. The system will accomodate most of the XML rules for you.

 

[marcus]

Fowler wrote about this a couple of years ago

http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/MovingAwayFromXslt.html

/Marcus

 

[mike leonard]

Thanks for the replies. Actually, it was Fowler's article that piqued
my interest in using REXML for transformations, but I didn't know the
first thing about it. Phlip's example above is just what I was looking
for. Incidentally, Phlip, what do you mean by "check the members first"?