Ruby Code to Pull XML Elements and Attributes from a XML Document

2009-03-03 19:31:03 by abowman in Ravings of a Lunatic (no comments) permalink

Here’s a question posted to a mailing list that I follow:

I just want to go through the xml and return the names of all the elements as well as the names of their attributes. It seems that most of the time, people know the name of the tag they’re looking for, and they want to get the inner html or the value of one of its attributes.

Is there a method in Hpricot or REXML that enables you to just get a list of all the tag names and attributes?

Here’s my solution:

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'hpricot'

doc = Hpricot(open("x.xml"))

elements = Array.new
attributes = Array.new

doc.search("//*").each do |e|
       if e.class == Hpricot::Elem
               elements << e.name
               e.attributes.each do |a|
                       attributes << a[0]
               end
       end
end

puts "Elements:"
puts elements.join("\n")

puts

puts "Attributes:"
puts attributes.join("\n")

It's ugly, but it gives you an array of elements and attributes. You could run sort and unique on the arrays if you wanted to get a stripped down list.

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