= Apricot eats Gorilla

Apricot eats Gorilla is a helper for working with XML and SOAP messages.
It's based on CobraVsMongoose but without REXML and the BadgerFish convention.
Also it offers some extras for working with SOAP messages.

== Install

  $ sudo gem install smacks-apricoteatsgorilla --source http://gems.github.com

== Dependencies

  Hpricot 0.6.164 (also available for JRuby)

== An example

Let's assume you receive the following SOAP response:

xml = '<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
    <soap:Body>
      <ns2:findCustomerByIdResponse xmlns:ns2="http://v1_0.ws.example.com/">
        <return>
          <empty>false</empty>
          <customer>
            <id>449810</id>
            <title xsi:nil="true" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"/>
            <name>Jungle Julia</name>
            <email>jj@example.com</email>
            <address />
          </customer>
        </return>
      </ns2:findCustomerByIdResponse>
    </soap:Body>
  </soap:Envelope>'

Just pass in the raw XML string:

  require "rubygems"
  require "apricoteatsgorilla
  hash = ApricotEatsGorilla.xml_to_hash(xml, "//return")

Or use the shortcut:

  hash = ApricotEatsGorilla(xml, "//return")

And it gets converted into a nice little Hash:

  "empty" => false,
  "customer" => {
    "address" => nil,
    "name" => "Jungle Julia",
    "title" => nil,
    "id" => "449810",
    "email" => "jj@example.com"
  }

== Conclusions

* The xml_to_hash method starts parsing the XML at the root node by default.
  By calling the method with an XPath expression as second parameter, we're
  able to define a custom root node.
* Node attributes are ignored and won't be included in the hash.
* The value of empty element nodes will be nil.
* Node values of "true" or "false" will be converted to boolean objects.

== More information

Take a look at the tests for some more examples.