Vitor Rodrigues

>> doc.find('/*').first.name
doc.find('/*').first.name
=> "Customer"
>> doc.find('/Customer').first.name
doc.find('/Customer').first.name
NoMethodError: You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
The error occurred while evaluating nil.name
	from (irb):52

Something is wrong with Ruby’s libxml xpath evaluator. I’m only able to use the wildcard * to select elements and not the element’s name. After doing some research on the project’s page, there are 2 comments about the problem, complaining that libxml’s support of XPath is just too limited and it has lots of problems when dealing with namespaces. Default namespaces are not parsed, namespace wildcards are not supported and namespace prefixes won’t work all the time. What’s the advantage of announcing a 300x faster xpath speed than rexml when it doesn’t work and valid xpath expressions return syntax error?

>> doc.find('/*:Customer').first.name
doc.find('/*:Customer').first.name
XML::XPath::InvalidPath: Invalid XPath expression
	from (irb):73:in `find'
	from (irb):73

It’s time to go back to the slower but working rexml.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Open Source, Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.