The Libxml-Ruby project provides Ruby language bindings for the GNOME Libxml2 XML toolkit. It is free software, released under the MIT License.
Libxml-ruby's primary advantage over REXML is performance - if speed is your need, these are good libraries to consider, as demonstrated by the informal benchmark below.
| Speed Comparison libxml vs. rexml | ||
| in seconds | libxml | rexml |
|---|---|---|
| opening | 0.003954 | 0.104750 |
| attribute_add | 0.001895 | 0.011114 |
| subelems | 0.000585 | 0.004729 |
| xpath | 0.013269 | 2.981499 |
You can find the latest release at:
http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=494
Libxml-Ruby is also available for installation via Rubygems -- see the installation page for details.
The code has now been updated to work with Ruby 1.8, and is compiling cleanly and working well with GCC 4.x. We still have a number of open bugs to address, which is being done as we work toward a 0.4.0 release and the library is generally fairly stable in use.