Nokogiri- searching for elements with a specific node

Question

I have the following sample XML: http://api.clicky.com/api/stats/4?site_id=32020&sitekey=71bf7c1681e22468&type=visitors,countries,searches (dummy xml data)

I want to specify the node "countries", then search through all of the "items" and extract various data. I'm attempting to do this with:

   xml = Nokogiri::XML(open("http://api.clicky.com/api/stats/4?site_id=32020&sitekey=71bf7c1681e22468&type=visitors,countries,searches"))
        @node = xml.xpath('//countries')
        @countries = @node.search('item').map do |item|
        %w[title value value_percent].each_with_object({}) do |n, o|
          o[n] = item.at(n).text
        end
      end
   end

But this doesn't give any results. If I strip the xml back to http://api.clicky.com/api/stats/4?site_id=32020&sitekey=71bf7c1681e22468&type=visitors and do:

   xml = Nokogiri::XML(open("http://api.clicky.com/api/stats/4?site_id=32020&sitekey=71bf7c1681e22468&type=countries"))
        @countries = @node.search('item').map do |item|
        %w[title value value_percent].each_with_object({}) do |n, o|
          o[n] = item.at(n).text
        end
      end
   end

This works fine.

Where am I going wrong here?

Answer 1

You xpath-query will only match nodes with name "countries" and not nodes that has the type-attribute set to "countries". So you will need to search for nodes that has a attribute "type" with value set to "countries"

Three ways for finding all items for countries

  # (1) Find all nodes with a attribute "type" set to "countries"
  items = xml.xpath("//*[@type='countries']//item") 

  # (2) Find only nodes with name "type" and that has the attribute "type" set to "countries"
  items = xml.xpath("//type[@type='countries']//item") 

  # (3) By using css selectors; find only nodes with name "type" and that has the attribute "type" set to "countries"
  items = xml.css("type[type='countries'] item")