techno.blog("Dion")

I used to cringe at having to work with XML. These days there are nice ways to work with it… from E4X to Groovy builders, and of course with Hpricot.

I wanted to take my OPML file and grep out the URLs so I could create a custom search engine that would search over my buddies (from the OPML file).

It is basically a one-liner with Hpricot:

require 'rubygems'
require 'hpricot'

filename = ARGV.first || 'mysubscriptions.opml'

doc = open(filename) { |f| Hpricot(f) }

(doc/"outline[@htmlurl]").each do |url|
puts url.attributes['htmlurl']
end

In my case the OPML file is just sitting on disk there, but I could easily have it grab the file from a URL:

require 'open-uri'
doc = Hpricot(open("http://almaer.com/mysubs.opml"))

Not bad until we implement JsDOM ;)

Oh, and here is my nice custom search engine: