Nokogiri-notepad is a Ruby Gem for easily extracting information from an xml file according the paths provided by Notepad++

To download the gem do

gem install 'nokogiri-notepad'

or to include it in your gemfile do

# Gemfile

gem 'nokogiri-notepad'

and then do bundle install

First create a parser object. This parser object takes three mandatory arguments and one optional.

The mandatory arguments are:

• file_path -> This is the absolute path to the xml file you want to process
• single_targets -> This is a hash containing with:
  • keys being the names of the methods you would like available on the parser instance
  • values being the path given to you by Notepad++ (by highlighting the value of the node and clicking Ctrl + Shift + Alt + P). Note they are always given as an array.
• multiple targets -> Sometimes a path will give you multiple nodes back. This hash is similar in construction to the single_targets except it will give you a method that will return an array of strings
• The Parser initalize method will only accept files with an xml extension by default. You can add an array of extensions to be accepted instead if you wish

<plane>
   <year> 1977 </year>
   <make> Cessna </make>
   <model> Skyhawk </model>
   <color> Light blue and white </color>
</plane>

If we want to target "1977" and "Cessna" saved on our parser instance our single_target hash would contain

single_targets = { "year" => ["/plane/year"], "make" => ["/plane/make"] }

Our parser instance would then have the following attributes

parser.year // "1977"
parser.make // "Cessna"

Sometimes we can get more complex xml files like below, where it is more difficult to target specific nodes. Let's say we want to target the "Tripacer" node. We would need to specify a node in the group that is unique. This will give us the group of nodes, from which we can access our target node. If we just give the path planes/plane/model this leads us to both "Centurian" and "Tripacer", which is not what we want. Instead we can do

single_targets = { "model" => ["/planes/plane/foo", "four", "model"] }

<planes>
   <plane>
      <foo> three </foo>      
      <year> 1960 </year>
      <make> Cessna </make>
      <model> Centurian </model>
      <color> Yellow and white </color>
   </plane>
   <plane>
      <foo> four </foo>
      <year> 1956 </year>
      <make> Piper </make>
      <model> Tripacer </model>
      <color> Blue </color>
   </plane>
</planes>

If we wanted to capture both "Centurian" and "Tripacer" above we would define the path in our multiple_targets hash

multiple_targets = { "model" => ["/planes/plane/model"] }

This would give us the following getter method available on our instance

parser.model // ["Centurian", "Tripacer"]