AxeML

AxeML is a notation for Nokogiri XML documents inspired by SXML.

gem install axeml

A document is represented by an array, possibly nested. The first element of each array must be a symbol indicating the node name. Further elements may either be strings or numbers which are treated as the node's content, hashes representing this node's attributes or further arrays which are then made into child nodes by the same rules. Instances of ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer (i.e. strings marked as html_safe) are injected without quoting.

The syntax can be described by the following grammar:

node       ::= [<node-name>, (<node> | <attributes> | <content>) ...]
node-name  ::= <Symbol>
attributes ::= <Hash>
content    ::= <String> | <Fixnum> | <Float> | <ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer>

AxeML.transform([:ul, { :class => 'menu' },
                 [:li, [:a, { :href => '/foo' }, 'foo']],
                 [:li, [:a, { :href => '/bar' }, 'bar']]]).to_s

=>

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ul class="menu">
  <li>
    <a href="/foo">foo</a>
  </li>
  <li>
    <a href="/bar">bar</a>
  </li>
</ul>

Note that since AxeML.transform returns an instance of Nokogiri::XML::Document you can directly use its search facilities, for example:

AxeML.transform([:foo, [:bar, [:baz, "very well"]]]).search('foo baz').text
=> "very well"

• actually implement transformation rules :-)
• support XML namespaces

Copyright (c) 2010 Moritz Heidkamp. See LICENSE for details.