REXML question

[Chris McMahon]

Hi...

I cargo-culted the following REXML statement, and it's working fine:

elements = Document.new( my_xml ).elements.to_a( "//*[text()]").map {
|e|
e.text.strip.empty? ? nil : e.text.strip}.compact

but I'm no expert at this. I want for this expression to return an
array containing every element of any given XML Document in a reliable
order. It seems to do so.

Is there any XML with elements that would not be captured by this
expression?

 

[Mark Volkmann]

Hi...

I cargo-culted the following REXML statement, and it's working fine:

elements =3D Document.new( my_xml ).elements.to_a( "//*[text()]").map {
|e|
e.text.strip.empty? ? nil : e.text.strip}.compact

but I'm no expert at this. I want for this expression to return an
array containing every element of any given XML Document in a reliable
order. It seems to do so.

Is there any XML with elements that would not be captured by this
expression?

Are you trying to find only elements that contain text in them that is
not just whitespace?

I can't comment on your use of REXML, but I'll comment on you XPath express=
ion.
"//*[text()]" means that you only want elements that have text in them.
Consider the following.
<car>
<make>Saturn</make>
<model>SC2</model>
<colors exterior=3D"purple" interior=3D"tan"/>
</car>

Which of these elements have text in them?
Clearly make and model do. Clearly colors does not.
Somewhat surprisingly, car does. It has whitespace inside it, in
addition to child elements. Not only that, it has four pieces of text
inside. A DOM parser would say that the car element has four text
child nodes. I'm not sure how REXML treats this.