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<!DOCTYPE documentation SYSTEM "http://www.germane-software.com/software/documentation/documentation.dtd">
<documentation>
  <head>
    <title>REXML Tutorial</title>

    <version>$Revision: 1.1.2.1 $</version>

    <date>*2001-296+594</date>

    <home>http://www.germane-software.com/~ser/software/rexml</home>

    <base></base>

    <language>ruby</language>

    <author email="ser@germane-software.com"
    href="http://www.germane-software.com/~ser">Sean Russell</author>
  </head>

  <overview>
    <purpose lang="en">
      <p>This is a tutorial for using <link
      href="http://www.germane-software.com/~ser/software/rexml">REXML</link>,
      a pure Ruby XML processor.</p>
    </purpose>

    <general>
      <p>REXML was inspired by the Electric XML library for Java, which
      features an easy-to-use API, small size, and speed. Hopefully, REXML,
      designed with the same philosophy, has these same features. I've tried
      to keep the API as intuitive as possible, and have followed the Ruby
      methodology for method naming and code flow, rather than mirroring the
      Java API.</p>

      <p>REXML supports both tree and stream document parsing. Stream parsing
      is faster (about 1.5 times as fast). However, with stream parsing, you
      don't get access to features such as XPath.</p>

      <p>The <link href="../doc/index.html">API</link> documentation also
      contains code snippits to help you learn how to use various methods.
      This tutorial serves as a starting point and quick guide to using
      REXML.</p>

      <subsection title="Tree Parsing XML and accessing Elements">
        <p>We'll start with parsing an XML document</p>

        <example>require "rexml/document"
file = File.new( "mydoc.xml" )
doc = REXML::Document.new file</example>

        <p>Line 3 creates a new document and parses the supplied file. You can
        also do the following</p>

        <example>require "rexml/document"
include REXML  # so that we don't have to prefix everything with REXML::...
string = &lt;&lt;EOF
  &lt;mydoc&gt;
    &lt;someelement attribute="nanoo"&gt;Text, text, text&lt;/someelement&gt;
  &lt;/mydoc&gt;
EOF
doc = Document.new string</example>

        <p>So parsing a string is just as easy as parsing a file. For future
        examples, I'm going to omit both the <code>require</code> and
        <code>include</code> lines.</p>

        <p>Once you have a document, you can access elements in that document
        in a number of ways:</p>

        <list>
          <item>The <code>Element</code> class itself has
          <code>each_element_with_attribute</code>, a common way of accessing
          elements.</item>

          <item>The attribute <code>Element.elements</code> is an
          <code>Elements</code> class instance which has the <code>each</code>
          and <code>[]</code> methods for accessing elements. Both methods can
          be supplied with an XPath for filtering, which makes them very
          powerful.</item>

          <item>Since <code>Element</code> is a subclass of Parent, you can
          also access the element's children directly through the Array-like
          methods <code>Element[], Element.each, Element.find,
          Element.delete</code>. This is the fastest way of accessing
          children, but note that, being a true array, XPath searches are not
          supported, and that all of the element children are contained in
          this array, not just the Element children.</item>
        </list>

        <p>Here are a few examples using these methods. First is the source
        document used in the examples. Save this as mydoc.xml before running
        any of the examples that require it:</p>

        <example title="The source document">&lt;inventory title="OmniCorp Store #45x10^3"&gt;
  &lt;section name="health"&gt;
    &lt;item upc="123456789" stock="12"&gt;
      &lt;name&gt;Invisibility Cream&lt;/name&gt;
      &lt;price&gt;14.50&lt;/price&gt;
      &lt;description&gt;Makes you invisible&lt;/description&gt;
    &lt;/item&gt;
    &lt;item upc="445322344" stock="18"&gt;
      &lt;name&gt;Levitation Salve&lt;/name&gt;
      &lt;price&gt;23.99&lt;/price&gt;
      &lt;description&gt;Levitate yourself for up to 3 hours per application&lt;/description&gt;
    &lt;/item&gt;
  &lt;/section&gt;
  &lt;section name="food"&gt;
    &lt;item upc="485672034" stock="653"&gt;
      &lt;name&gt;Blork and Freen Instameal&lt;/name&gt;
      &lt;price&gt;4.95&lt;/price&gt;
      &lt;description&gt;A tasty meal in a tablet; just add water&lt;/description&gt;
    &lt;/item&gt;
    &lt;item upc="132957764" stock="44"&gt;
      &lt;name&gt;Grob winglets&lt;/name&gt;
      &lt;price&gt;3.56&lt;/price&gt;
      &lt;description&gt;Tender winglets of Grob. Just add water&lt;/description&gt;
    &lt;/item&gt;
  &lt;/section&gt;
&lt;/inventory&gt;</example>

        <example title="Accessing Elements">doc = Document.new File.new("mydoc.xml")
doc.elements.each("inventory/section") { |element| puts element.attributes["name"] }
# -&gt; health
# -&gt; food
doc.elements.each("*/section/item") { |element| puts element.attributes["upc"] }
# -&gt; 123456789
# -&gt; 445322344
# -&gt; 485672034
# -&gt; 132957764
root = doc.root
puts root.attributes["title"]
# -&gt; OmniCorp Store #45x10^3
puts root.elements["section/item[@stock='44']"].attributes["upc"]
# -&gt; 132957764
puts root.elements["section"].attributes["name"] 
# -&gt; health (returns the first encountered matching element) 
puts root.elements[1].attributes["name"] 
# -&gt; health (returns the FIRST child element) 
root.detect {|node| node.kind_of? Element and node.attributes["name"] == "food" }</example>

        <p>Notice the second-to-last line of code. Element children in REXML
        are indexed starting at 1, not 0. This is because XPath itself counts
        elements from 1, and REXML maintains this relationship; IE,
        <code>root.elements['*[1]'] == root.elements[1]</code>. The last line
        finds the first child element with the name of "food". As you can see
        in this example, accessing attributes is also straightforward.</p>

        <p>You can also access xpaths directly via the XPath class.</p>

        <example title="Using XPath"># The invisibility cream is the first &lt;item&gt;
invisibility = XPath.first( doc, "//item" ) 
# Prints out all of the prices
XPath.each( doc, "//price") { |element| puts element.text }
# Gets an array of all of the "name" elements in the document.
names = XPath.match( doc, "//name" ) </example>

        <p>Another way of getting an array of matching nodes is through
        Element.elements.to_a(). Although this is a method on elements, if
        passed an XPath it can return an array of arbitrary objects. This is
        due to the fact that XPath itself can return arbitrary nodes
        (Attribute nodes, Text nodes, and Element nodes).</p>

        <example title="Using to_a()">all_elements = doc.elements.to_a
all_children = doc.to_a
all_upc_strings = doc.elements.to_a( "//item/attribute::upc" )
all_name_elements = doc.elements.to_a( "//name" )</example>
      </subsection>

      <subsection title="Text Nodes">
        <p>REXML attempts to make the common case simple, but this means that
        the uncommon case can be complicated. This is especially true with
        Text nodes.</p>

        <p>Text nodes have a lot of behavior, and in the case of internal
        entities, what you get may be different from what you expect. When
        REXML reads an XML document, in parses the DTD and creates an internal
        table of entities. If it finds any of these entities in the document,
        it replaces them with their values:</p>

        <example title="Entity Replacement">doc = Document.new '&lt;!DOCTYPE foo [
&lt;!ENTITY ent "replace"&gt;
]&gt;&lt;a&gt;&amp;ent;&lt;/a&gt;'
doc.root.text   #-&gt; "replace"
</example>

        <p>When you write the document back out, REXML replaces the values
        with the entity reference:</p>

        <example>doc.to_s
# Generates:
# &lt;!DOCTYPE foo [
# &lt;!ENTITY ent "replace"&gt;
# ]&gt;&lt;a&gt;&amp;ent;&lt;/a&gt;</example>

        <p>But there's a problem. What happens if only some of the words are
        also entity reference values?</p>

        <example>doc = Document.new '&lt;!DOCTYPE foo [
&lt;!ENTITY ent "replace"&gt;
]&gt;&lt;a&gt;replace &amp;ent;&lt;/a&gt;'
doc.root.text   #-&gt; "replace replace"
</example>

        <p>Well, REXML does the only thing it can:</p>

        <example>doc.to_s
# Generates:
# &lt;!DOCTYPE foo [
# &lt;!ENTITY ent "replace"&gt;
# ]&gt;&lt;a&gt;&amp;ent; &amp;ent;&lt;/a&gt;</example>

        <p>This is probably not what you expect. However, when designing
        REXML, I had a choice between this behavior, and using immutable text
        nodes. The problem is that, if you can change the text in a node,
        REXML can never tell which tokens you want to have replaced with
        entities. There is a wrinkle: REXML will write what it gets in as long
        as you don't access the text. This is because REXML does lazy
        evaluation of entities. Therefore,</p>

        <example title="Lazy Evaluation">doc = Document.new( '&lt;!DOCTYPE foo
        [ &lt;!ENTITY ent "replace"&gt; ]&gt;&lt;a&gt;replace
        &amp;ent;&lt;/a&gt;' ) doc.to_s # Generates: # &lt;!DOCTYPE foo [ #
        &lt;!ENTITY ent "replace"&gt; # ]&gt;&lt;a&gt;<emphasis>replace
        &amp;ent;</emphasis>&lt;/a&gt; doc.root.text #-&gt; Now accessed,
        entities have been resolved doc.to_s # Generates: # &lt;!DOCTYPE foo [
        # &lt;!ENTITY ent "replace"&gt; # ]&gt;&lt;a&gt;<emphasis>&amp;ent;
        &amp;ent;</emphasis>&lt;/a&gt;</example>

        <p>There is a programmatic solution: <code>:raw</code>. If you set the
        <code>:raw</code> flag on any Text or Element node, the entities
        within that node will not be processed. This means that you'll have to
        deal with entities yourself:</p>

        <example title="Entity Replacement">doc = Document.new('&lt;!DOCTYPE
        foo [ &lt;!ENTITY ent "replace"&gt; ]&gt;&lt;a&gt;replace
        &amp;ent;&lt;/a&gt;',<emphasis>{:raw=&gt;:all})</emphasis>
        doc.root.text #-&gt; "replace &amp;ent;" doc.to_s # Generates: #
        &lt;!DOCTYPE foo [ # &lt;!ENTITY ent "replace"&gt; #
        ]&gt;&lt;a&gt;replace &amp;ent;&lt;/a&gt;</example>
      </subsection>

      <subsection title="Creating XML documents">
        <p>Again, there are a couple of mechanisms for creating XML documents
        in REXML. Adding elements by hand is faster than the convenience
        method, but which you use will probably be a matter of aesthetics.</p>

        <example title="Creating elements">el = someelement.add_element "myel" 
# creates an element named "myel", adds it to "someelement", and returns it 
el2 = el.add_element "another", {"id"=&gt;"10"} 
# does the same, but also sets attribute "id" of el2 to "10" 
el3 = Element.new "blah" 
el1.elements &lt;&lt; el3 
el3.attributes["myid"] = "sean" 
# creates el3 "blah", adds it to el1, then sets attribute "myid" to "sean"</example>

        <p>If you want to add text to an element, you can do it by either
        creating Text objects and adding them to the element, or by using the
        convenience method <code>text=</code></p>

        <example title="Adding text">el1 = Element.new "myelement" 
el1.text = "Hello world!" 
# -&gt; &lt;myelement&gt;Hello world!&lt;/myelement&gt; 
el1.add_text "Hello dolly" 
# -&gt; &lt;myelement&gt;Hello world!Hello dolly&lt;/element&gt; 
el1.add Text.new("Goodbye") 
# -&gt; &lt;myelement&gt;Hello world!Hello dollyGoodbye&lt;/element&gt; 
el1 &lt;&lt; Text.new(" cruel world") 
# -&gt; &lt;myelement&gt;Hello world!Hello dollyGoodbye cruel world&lt;/element&gt;</example>

        <p>But note that each of these text objects are still stored as
        separate objects; <code>el1.text</code> will return "Hello world!";
        <code>el1[2]</code> will return a Text object with the contents
        "Goodbye".</p>

        <p>Please be aware that all text nodes in REXML are UTF-8 encoded, and
        all of your code must reflect this. You may input and output other
        encodings (UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8859-1, and UNILE are all supported,
        input and output), but within your program, you must pass REXML UTF-8
        strings.</p>

        <p>I can't emphasize this enough, because people do have problems with
        this. REXML can't possibly alway guess correctly how your text is
        encoded, so it always assumes the text is UTF-8. It also does not warn
        you when you try to add text which isn't properly encoded, for the
        same reason. You must make sure that you are adding UTF-8 text.
        &#160;If you're adding standard 7-bit ASCII, which is most common, you
        don't have to worry. &#160;If you're using ISO-8859-1 text (characters
        above 0x80), you must convert it to UTF-8 before adding it to an
        element. &#160;You can do this with the shard:
        <code>text.unpack("C*").pack("U*")</code>. If you ignore this warning
        and add 8-bit ASCII characters to your documents, your code may
        work... or it may not. &#160;In either case, REXML is not at fault.
        You have been warned.</p>

        <p>One last thing: alternate encoding output support only works from
        Document.write() and Document.to_s(). If you want to write out other
        nodes with a particular encoding, you must wrap your output object
        with Output:</p>

        <example title="Encoded Output">e = Element.new "&lt;a/&gt;"
e.text = "f\xfcr"   # ISO-8859-1 'ü'
o = ''
e.write( Output.new( o, "ISO-8859-1" ) )
</example>

        <p>You can pass Output any of the supported encodings.</p>

        <p>If you want to insert an element between two elements, you can use
        either the standard Ruby array notation, or
        <code>Parent.insert_before</code> and
        <code>Parent.insert_after</code>.</p>

        <example title="Inserts">doc = Document.new "&lt;a&gt;&lt;one/&gt;&lt;three/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;" 
doc.root[1,0] = Element.new "two" 
# -&gt; &lt;a&gt;&lt;one/&gt;&lt;two/&gt;&lt;three/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; 
three = doc.elements["a/three"] 
doc.root.insert_after three, Element.new "four" 
# -&gt; &lt;a&gt;&lt;one/&gt;&lt;two/&gt;&lt;three/&gt;&lt;four/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; 
# A convenience method allows you to insert before/after an XPath: 
doc.root.insert_after( "//one", Element.new("one-five") ) 
# -&gt; &lt;a&gt;&lt;one/&gt;&lt;one-five/&gt;&lt;two/&gt;&lt;three/&gt;&lt;four/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; 
# Another convenience method allows you to insert after/before an element: 
four = doc.elements["//four"] 
four.previous_sibling = Element.new("three-five") 
# -&gt; &lt;a&gt;&lt;one/&gt;&lt;one-five/&gt;&lt;two/&gt;&lt;three/&gt;&lt;three-five/&gt;&lt;four/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;</example>

        <p>The <code>raw</code> flag in the <code>Text</code> constructor can
        be used to tell REXML to leave strings which have entities defined for
        them alone.</p>

        <example title="Raw text">doc = Document.new( "&lt;?xml version='1.0?&gt;
&lt;!DOCTYPE foo SYSTEM 'foo.dtd' [
&lt;!ENTITY % s "Sean"&gt;
]&gt;
&lt;a/&gt;"
t = Text.new( "Sean", false, nil, false )
doc.root.text = t
t.to_s     # -&gt; &amp;s;
t = Text.new( "Sean", false, nil, true )
doc.root.text = t
t.to_s     # -&gt; Sean</example>

        <p>Note that, in all cases, the <code>value()</code> method returns
        the text with entities expanded, so the <code>raw</code> flag only
        affects the <code>to_s()</code> method. If the <code>raw</code> is set
        for a text node, then <code>to_s()</code> will not entities will not
        normalize (turn into entities) entity values. You can not create raw
        text nodes that contain illegal XML, so the following will generate a
        parse error:</p>

        <example>t = Text.new( "&amp;", false, nil, true )</example>

        <p>You can also tell REXML to set the Text children of given elements
        to raw automatically, on parsing or creating:</p>

        <example title="Automatic raw text handling">doc = REXML::Document.new( source, { :raw =&gt; %w{ tag1 tag2 tag3 } }</example>

        <p>In this example, all tags named "tag1", "tag2", or "tag3" will have
        any Text children set to raw text. If you want to have all of the text
        processed as raw text, pass in the :all tag:</p>

        <example title="Raw documents">doc = REXML::Document.new( source, { :raw =&gt; :all })</example>
      </subsection>

      <subsection title="Writing a tree">
        <p>There aren't many things that are more simple than writing a REXML
        tree. Simply pass an object that supports <code>&lt;&lt;( String
        )</code> to the <code>write</code> method of any object. In Ruby, both
        IO instances (File) and String instances support &lt;&lt;.</p>

        <example>doc.write $stdout 
output = "" 
doc.write output</example>

        <p>If you want REXML to pretty-print output, pass <code>write()</code>
        an indent value greater than -1:</p>

        <example title="Write with pretty-printing">doc.write( $stdout, 0 )</example>

        <p>REXML will not, by default, write out the XML declaration unless
        you specifically ask for them. If a document is read that contains an
        XML declaration, that declaration <emphasis>will</emphasis> be written
        faithfully. The other way you can tell REXML to write the declaration
        is to specifically add the declaration:</p>

        <example title="Adding an XML Declaration to a Document">doc = Document.new 
doc.add_element 'foo'
doc.to_s   #-&gt; &lt;foo/&gt;
doc &lt;&lt; XMLDecl.new
doc.to_s   #-&gt; &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;&lt;foo/&gt;</example>
      </subsection>

      <subsection title="Iterating">
        <p>There are four main methods of iterating over children.
        <code>Element.each</code>, which iterates over all the children;
        <code>Element.elements.each</code>, which iterates over just the child
        Elements; <code>Element.next_element</code> and
        <code>Element.previous_element</code>, which can be used to fetch the
        next Element siblings; and <code>Element.next_sibling</code> and
        <code>Eleemnt.previous_sibling</code>, which fetches the next and
        previous siblings, regardless of type.</p>
      </subsection>

      <subsection title="Stream Parsing">
        <p>REXML stream parsing requires you to supply a Listener class. When
        REXML encounters events in a document (tag start, text, etc.) it
        notifies your listener class of the event. You can supply any subset
        of the methods, but make sure you implement method_missing if you
        don't implement them all. A StreamListener module has been supplied as
        a template for you to use.</p>

        <example title="Stream parsing">list = MyListener.new 
source = File.new "mydoc.xml" 
REXML::Document.parse_stream(source, list)</example>

        <p>Stream parsing in REXML is much like SAX, where events are
        generated when the parser encounters them in the process of parsing
        the document. When a tag is encountered, the stream listener's
        <code>tag_start()</code> method is called. When the tag end is
        encountered, <code>tag_end()</code> is called. When text is
        encountered, <code>text()</code> is called, and so on, until the end
        of the stream is reached. One other note: the method
        <code>entity()</code> is called when an <code>&amp;entity;</code> is
        encountered in text, and only then.</p>

        <p>Please look at the <link
        href="../doc/classes/REXML/StreamListener.html">StreamListener
        API</link> for more information.<footnote>You must generate the API
        documentation with rdoc or download the API documentation from the
        REXML website for this documentation.</footnote></p>
      </subsection>

      <subsection title="Whitespace">
        <p>By default, REXML respects whitespace in your document. In many
        applications, you want the parser to compress whitespace in your
        document. In these cases, you have to tell the parser which elements
        you want to respect whitespace in by passing a context to the
        parser:</p>

        <example title="Compressing whitespace">doc = REXML::Document.new( source, { :compress_whitespace =&gt; %w{ tag1 tag2 tag3 } }</example>

        <p>Whitespace for tags "tag1", "tag2", and "tag3" will be compressed;
        all other tags will have their whitespace respected. Like :raw, you
        can set :compress_whitespace to :all, and have all elements have their
        whitespace compressed.</p>

        <p>You may also use the tag <code>:respect_whitespace</code>, which
        flip-flops the behavior. If you use <code>:respect_whitespace</code>
        for one or more tags, only those elements will have their whitespace
        respected; all other tags will have their whitespace compressed.</p>
      </subsection>

      <subsection title="Automatic Entity Processing">
        <p>REXML does some automatic processing of entities for your
        convenience. The processed entities are &amp;, &lt;, &gt;, ", and '.
        If REXML finds any of these characters in Text or Attribute values, it
        automatically turns them into entity references when it writes them
        out. Additionally, when REXML finds any of these entity references in
        a document source, it converts them to their character equivalents.
        All other entity references are left unprocessed. If REXML finds an
        &amp;, &lt;, or &gt; in the document source, it will generate a
        parsing error.</p>

        <example title="Entity processing">bad_source = "&lt;a&gt;Cats &amp; dogs&lt;/a&gt;" 
good_source = "&lt;a&gt;Cats &amp;amp; &amp;#100;ogs&lt;/a&gt;" 
doc = REXML::Document.new bad_source 
# Generates a parse error 
doc = REXML::Document.new good_source 
puts doc.root.text 
# -&gt; "Cats &amp; &amp;#100;ogs" 
doc.root.write $stdout 
# -&gt; "&lt;a&gt;Cats &amp;amp; &amp;#100;ogs&lt;/a&gt;" 
doc.root.attributes["m"] = "x'y\"z" 
puts doc.root.attributes["m"] 
# -&gt; "x'y\"z" 
doc.root.write $stdout 
# -&gt; "&lt;a m='x&amp;apos;y&amp;quot;z'&gt;Cats &amp;amp; &amp;#100;ogs&lt;/a&gt;"</example>
      </subsection>

      <subsection title="Namespaces">
        <p>Namespaces are fully supported in REXML and within the XPath
        parser. There are a few caveats when using XPath, however:</p>

        <list>
          <item>If you don't supply a namespace mapping, the default namespace
          mapping of the context element is used. This has its limitations,
          but is convenient for most purposes.</item>

          <item>If you need to supply a namespace mapping, you must use the
          XPath methods <code>each</code>, <code>first</code>, and
          <code>match</code> and pass them the mapping.</item>
        </list>

        <example title="Using namespaces">source = "&lt;a xmlns:x='foo' xmlns:y='bar'&gt;&lt;x:b id='1'/&gt;&lt;y:b id='2'/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;"
doc = Document.new source
doc.elements["/a/x:b"].attributes["id"]	                     # -&gt; '1'
XPath.first(doc, "/a/m:b", {"m"=&gt;"bar"}).attributes["id"]   # -&gt; '2'
doc.elements["//x:b"].prefix                                # -&gt; 'x'
doc.elements["//x:b"].namespace	                             # -&gt; 'foo'
XPath.first(doc, "//m:b", {"m"=&gt;"bar"}).prefix              # -&gt; 'y'</example>
      </subsection>

      <subsection title="Pull parsing">
        <p>The pull parser API is not yet stable. When it settles down, I'll
        fill in this section. For now, you'll have to bite the bullet and read
        the <link
        href="http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml_doc/classes/REXML/PullParser.html">PullParser</link>
        API docs. Ignore the PullListener class; it is a private helper
        class.</p>
      </subsection>

      <subsection title="SAX2 Stream Parsing">
        <p>The original REXML stream parsing API is very minimal. This also
        means that it is fairly fast. For a more complex, more "standard" API,
        REXML also includes a streaming parser with a SAX2+ API. This API
        differs from SAX2 in a couple of ways, such as having more filters and
        multiple notification mechanisms, but the core API is SAX2.</p>

        <p>The two classes in the SAX2 API are <link
        href="http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml_doc/classes/REXML/SAX2Parser.html"><code>SAX2Parser</code></link>
        and <link
        href="http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml_doc/classes/REXML/SAX2Listener.html"><code>SAX2Listener</code></link>.
        You can use the parser in one of five ways, depending on your needs.
        Three of the ways are useful if you are filtering for a small number
        of events in the document, such as just printing out the names of all
        of the elements in a document, or getting all of the text in a
        document. The other two ways are for more complex processing, where
        you want to be notified of multiple events. The first three involve
        Procs, and the last two involve listeners. The listener mechanisms are
        very similar to the original REXML streaming API, with the addition of
        filtering options, and are faster than the proc mechanisms.</p>

        <p>An example is worth a thousand words, so we'll just take a look at
        a small example of each of the mechanisms. The first example involves
        printing out only the text content of a document.</p>

        <example title="Filtering for Events with Procs">require 'rexml/sax2parser'
parser = REXML::SAX2Parser.new( File.new( 'documentation.xml' ) )
parser.listen( :characters ) {|text| puts text }
parser.parse</example>

        <p>In this example, we tell the parser to call our block for every
        <code>characters</code> event. "characters" is what SAX2 calls Text
        nodes. The event is identified by the symbol <code>:characters</code>.
        There are a number of these events, including
        <code>:element_start</code>, <code>:end_prefix_mapping</code>, and so
        on; the events are named after the methods in the
        <code>SAX2Listener</code> API, so refer to that document for a
        complete list.</p>

        <p>You can additionally filter for particular elements by passing an
        array of tag names to the <code>listen</code> method. In further
        examples, we will not include the <code>require</code> or parser
        construction lines, as they are the same for all of these
        examples.</p>

        <example title="Filtering for Events on Particular Elements with Procs">parser.listen( :characters, %w{ changelog todo } ) {|text| puts text }
parser.parse</example>

        <p>In this example, only the text content of changelog and todo
        elements will be printed. The array of tag names can also contain
        regular expressions which the element names will be matched
        against.</p>

        <p>Finally, as a shortcut, if you do not pass a symbol to the listen
        method, it will default to <code>:element_start</code></p>

        <example title="Default Events">parser.listen( %w{ item }) do |uri,localname,qname,attributes| 
  puts attributes['version']
end
parser.parse</example>

        <p>This example prints the "version" attribute of all "item" elements
        in the document. Notice that the number of arguments passed to the
        block is larger than for <code>:text</code>; again, check the
        SAX2Listener API for a list of what arguments are passed the blocks
        for a given event.</p>

        <p>The last two mechanisms for parsing use the SAX2Listener API. Like
        StreamListener, SAX2Listener is a <code>module</code>, so you can
        <code>include</code> it in your class to give you an adapter. To use
        the listener model, create a class that implements some of the
        SAX2Listener methods, or all of them if you don't include the
        SAX2Listener model. Add them to a parser as you would blocks, and when
        the parser is run, the methods will be called when events occur.
        Listeners do not use event symbols, but they can filter on element
        names.</p>

        <example title="Filtering for Events with Listeners">listener1 = MySAX2Listener.new
listener2 = MySAX2Listener.new
parser.listen( listener1 )
parser.listen( %{ changelog, todo, credits }, listener2 )
parser.parse</example>

        <p>In the previous example, <code>listener1</code> will be notified of
        all events that occur, and <code>listener2</code> will only be
        notified of events that occur in <code>changelog</code>,
        <code>todo</code>, and <code>credits</code> elements. We also see that
        multiple listeners can be added to the same parser; multiple blocks
        can also be added, and listeners and blocks can be mixed together.</p>

        <p>There is, as yet, no mechanism for recursion. Two upcoming features
        of the SAX2 API will be the ability to filter based on an XPath, and
        the ability to specify filtering on an elemnt and all of its
        descendants.</p>

        <p><em>WARNING:</em> The SAX2 API for dealing with doctype (DTD)
        events almost <em>certainly</em> will change.</p>
      </subsection>

      <subsection title="Convenience methods">
        <p>Michael Neumann contributed some convenience functions for nodes,
        and they are general enough that I've included. Michael's use-case
        examples follow: <example title="Node convenience functions">#
        Starting with +root_node+, we recursively look for a node with the
        given # +tag+, the given +attributes+ (a Hash) and whoose text equals
        or matches the # +text+ string or regular expression. # # To find the
        following node: # # &lt;td class='abc'&gt;text&lt;/td&gt; # # We use:
        # # find_node(root, 'td', {'class' =&gt; 'abc'}, "text") # # Returns
        +nil+ if no matching node was found. def find_node(root_node, tag,
        attributes, text) root_node.find_first_recursive {|node| node.name ==
        tag and attributes.all? {|attr, val| node.attributes[attr] == val} and
        text === node.text } end # # Extract specific columns (specified by
        the position of it's corrensponding # header column) from a table. # #
        Given the following table: # # &lt;table&gt; # &lt;tr&gt; #
        &lt;td&gt;A&lt;/td&gt; # &lt;td&gt;B&lt;/td&gt; #
        &lt;td&gt;C&lt;/td&gt; # &lt;/tr&gt; # &lt;tr&gt; #
        &lt;td&gt;A.1&lt;/td&gt; # &lt;td&gt;B.1&lt;/td&gt; #
        &lt;td&gt;C.1&lt;/td&gt; # &lt;/tr&gt; # &lt;tr&gt; #
        &lt;td&gt;A.2&lt;/td&gt; # &lt;td&gt;B.2&lt;/td&gt; #
        &lt;td&gt;C.2&lt;/td&gt; # &lt;/tr&gt; # &lt;/table&gt; # # To extract
        the first (A) and last (C) column: # # extract_from_table(root_node,
        ["A", "C"]) # # And you get this as result: # # [ # ["A.1", "C.1"], #
        ["A.2", "C.2"] # ] # def extract_from_table(root_node, headers) #
        extract and collect all header nodes header_nodes = headers.collect {
        |header| find_node(root_node, 'td', {}, header) } raise "some headers
        not found" if header_nodes.compact.size &lt; headers.size # assert
        that all headers have the same parent 'header_row', which is the row #
        in which the header_nodes are contained. 'table' is the surrounding
        table tag. header_row = header_nodes.first.parent table =
        header_row.parent raise "different parents" unless header_nodes.all?
        {|n| n.parent == header_row} # we now iterate over all rows in the
        table that follows the header_row. # for each row we collect the
        elements at the same positions as the header_nodes. # this is what we
        finally return from the method. (header_row.index_in_parent+1 ..
        table.elements.size).collect do |inx| row = table.elements[inx]
        header_nodes.collect { |n| row.elements[ n.index_in_parent ].text }
        end end</example></p>
      </subsection>

      <subsection title="Conclusion">
        <p>This isn't everything there is to REXML, but it should be enough to
        get started. Check the <link href="../doc/index.html">API
        documentation</link><footnote>You must generate the API documentation
        with rdoc or download the API documentation from the REXML website for
        this documentation.</footnote> for particulars and more examples.
        There are plenty of unit tests in the <code>test/</code> directory,
        and these are great sources of working examples.</p>
      </subsection>
    </general>
  </overview>

  <credits>
    <p>Among the people who've contributed to this document are:</p>

    <list>
      <item><link href="mailto:deicher@sandia.gov">Eichert, Diana</link> (bug
      fix)</item>
    </list>
  </credits>
</documentation>