Ruby in Practice

Chapter 10. Structured documents

This chapter covers

• Using XML to read configuration files
• Working with HTML
• Generating XML with Hpricot
• Reading RSS feeds

Almost any Ruby program you write will involve either loading data from an external source or exporting data produced in your program to an external source, which will be reloaded later or loaded by another program. You might use a dead-simple representation like YAML or a more complex one like Atom to store the data, but the basic principles will remain the same.

While you’ll have the ability to choose the data format for your configuration files or external storage, you will often run into situations where you need to use data produced by someone else, often by programs written in other programming ...