XPathQuery offers a uniform interface to make queries on XML documents that are local, remote or stored on a XML database. Different XPath backends are supported (right now BaseX, eXist-db and Nokogiri).
The main use of XPathQuery is to query remote XML databases without dealing with the details such as request envelopes, deserialization and so on.
# first we set up the query engine
require 'xpathquery/exist'
xml_remote = XPathQuery::Exist.new('http://localhost:8080/exist/rest/db')
# then we perform the query and we get back an array of XML nodes
results = xml_remote.query('//patron')
results.map { |result| p result.class }
# => [Nokogiri::XML::Element, Nokogiri::XML::Element, ...]
Namespaces are supported and are simple to use
ns = { 'foaf' => 'http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/' }
results = xml_remote.query('//foaf:name', ns)
If a logger is supplied during the engine initialization it will be used to log the queries made and the results received.
The Rails logger can be easily integrated passing Rails.logger to the
engine constructor.
xml = XPathQuery::Exist.new('http://localhost:8080/...', logger: Rails.logger)
The messages will be logged at the :debug level.
The xpathquery gem depends on the nokogiri gem, even when the Nokogiri
engine is not used.
Additionally, the BaseX and eXist-db backends depend on the rest_client gem.
If you want to use these backends, you must install the rest_client gem,
because it is not a direct dependency of the xpathquery and RubyGems does
not have the concept of "optional dependency".
This gem requires a modern Ruby implementation as MRI 2.1, JRuby or Rubinious.
gem install xpathquery
- Gioele Barabucci http://svario.it/gioele (initial author)
Code : http://svario.it/xpathquery (redirects to GitHub)
Report issues : http://svario.it/xpathquery/issues
Documentation : http://svario.it/xpathquery/docs
This is free software released into the public domain (CC0 license).
See the COPYING file or http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
for more details.