Convert XML collection (of Pivotal Tracker stories) to Ruby hash/object

Question

I have a collection of stories in an XML format. I would like to parse the file and return each story as either hash or Ruby object, so that I can further manipulate the data wi

Answer 1

You can leverage the Hash extensions in ActiveSupport. Then you just need to parse your document in Nokogiri and then convert the nodeset result into a hash. This method will preserve attribute typing (eg integers, dates, arrays). (Of course if you're using Rails you don't have to require/include active support or nokogiri if you have it in your environment. I'm assuming a pure Ruby implementation here.)

require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'activesupport'

include ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Hash

doc = Nokogiri::XML.parse(File.read('yourdoc.xml'))
my_hash = doc.search('//story').map{ |e| Hash.from_xml(e.to_xml)['story'] }

This will produce an array of hashes (one for each story node), and preserve the typing based on the attributes, as demonstrated below:

my_hash.first['name']
=> "Receivable index listing will allow selection viewing"

my_hash.first['id']
=> 16376

my_hash.first['id'].class
=> Fixnum

my_hash.first['created_at'].class
=> Time