openurl

openurl is a Ruby library creating, parsing and using NISO Z39.88 OpenURLs over HTTP. http://openurl.info/registry

While openurl can send requests to OpenURL 1.0 resolvers, there is no 'standard' response format, so parsing the returned value is up to you.

require 'openurl'    

# Create your context object
context_object = OpenURL::ContextObject.new

# Add metadata to the Context Object Entities
context_object.referent.set_format('journal')
context_object.referent.add_identifier('info:doi/10.1016/j.ipm.2005.03.024')
context_object.referent.set_metadata('issn', '0306-4573')
context_object.referent.set_metadata('aulast', 'Bollen')
context_object.referrer.add_identifier('info:sid/google')

puts context_object.kev  

puts context_object.xml  

# Send the context object to an OpenURL link resolver
transport = OpenURL::Transport.new('http://demo.exlibrisgroup.com:9003/lr_3', context_object)
transport.get
puts tranport.response

# Create a new ContextObject from an existing kev or XML serialization:
#
# ContextObject.new_from_kev(   kev_context_object )
# ContextObject.new_from_xml(   xml_context_object ) # Can be String or REXML::Document

Gem is currently developed under 1.9.3, although it should work under 1.8.7. There is some limited support for handling character encodings in the proper ruby 1.9 way.

When using ContextObject#load_from_kev or #load_from_form_vars, input will be assumed to be UTF8, unless a ctx_enc value is present specifying ISO-8859-1. The actual ruby #encoding of the input string/stream is ignored, data will be force_encoded on read. If input is specified ISO-8859-1 with ctx_enc data will be transcoded to UTF8 on read.

Any illegal bytes for the input character encoding will be replaced by the unicode replacement symbol ("\uFFFD") on read.

Input will be assumed UTF8, and force_encoded to UTF8. Illegal bytes in input for UTF8 will be replaced by unicode replacement char ("\uFFFD").

Programmatically created context objects, you must ensure all strings are represented and tagged as utf8 encoded yourself, no detection or trascoding or correction will be done for you.

You should be able to install the gem:

gem install openurl

The source lives in git on github:

http://github.com/openurl/openurl

There are some automated tests. Run with rake test. They live in ./test and use Test::Unit.