I need to parse a large (4gb) xml file in ruby, preferably with nokogiri. I've seen a lot of code exampled using
File.open(path)
but this takes too much time in my case. Is there an option to read the xml node by node in order to prevent loading the file at ones. Or what would be the fastest way to parse such a large file.
Best,
Phil
You can try using Nokogiri::XML::SAX
The basic way a SAX style parser works is by creating a parser,
telling the parser about the events we’re interested in, then giving
the parser some XML to process. The parser will notify you when it
encounters events your said you would like to know about.
I do this kind of work with LibXML http://xml4r.github.io/libxml-ruby/ (require 'xml') and its LibXML::XML::Reader API. It's simpler than SAX and allows you to make almost everything. REXML includes a similar API also, but it's quite buggy. Stream APIs like the one I mention or SAX shouldn't have any problem with huge files. I have not tested Nokogiri.
you may like to try this out - https://github.com/amolpujari/reading-huge-xml
HugeXML.read xml, elements_lookup do |element|
# => element{ :name, :value, :attributes}
end
I also tried using ox
Related
In this Ruby 1.8.7 application, YAML deserializing (done with YAML.load) is needed because the existing data is stored in many relatively small YAML documents, but is a performance bottleneck.
Is there a way or a library that has this better? Upgrading to ruby 1.9 is not an option.
I am not an expert but if it's possible for you to convert the YAML documents to Marshal documents and then use Marshal.load afterwards in the application, it should be much faster. I used this gist a while back to compare YAML vs Marshal performance.
I didn't find a way to do this. I've tried converting YAML to JSON via string manipulation, then parsing that with fast JSON parsers such as Yajl and OJ, but the overhead of converting YAML to JSON was already longer than actually parsing YAML.
My conversion script probably wasn't as fast as it could be if someone smart really dedicated a lot of time to do this, but I gave up on this early after I realized even if I optimize my own script, it still wouldn't beat YAML parsing time significantly enough to warrant the whole approach.
According to this experiment, using ZAML under 1.8.7 will be faster than the YAML parser.
What's a good way to transform XML to ruby code? I've got a GraphML file containing information about a graph structure. I want to instantiate a graph from that with ruby objects.
Currently I use XPath to do this in a procedural way. I know, there's also a way to do it with XSLT in a more declarative way.
Do you know other ways? What would you suggest, any experience?
I don't quite understand why you would want to transform the GraphML data into Ruby code, rather than using Ruby to parse the GraphML data into Ruby object instances?
I made this example as an exercise: https://github.com/endymion/GraphML-parsing-exercise
It uses Nokogiri to parse the XML, then XPath to select nodes, then it iterates through the nodes, instantiating Ruby object instances: https://github.com/endymion/GraphML-parsing-exercise/blob/master/parse.rb
Is that roughly what you're looking for?
I have a number of data files to process from a data warehouse that have the following format:
:header 1 ...
:header n
# remarks 1 ...
# remarks n
# column header 1
# column header 2
DATA ROWS
(Example: "#### ## ## ##### ######## ####### ###afp## ##e###")
The data is separated by white spaces and has both numbers and other ASCII chars. Some of those pieces of data will be split up and made more meaningful.
All of the data will go into a database, initially an SQLite db for development, and then pushed up to another, more permanent, storage.
These files will be pulled in actually via HTTP from the remote server and I will have to crawl a bit to get some of it as they span folders and many files.
I was hopeful to get some input what the best tools and methods may be to accomplish this the "Ruby way", as well as to abstract out some of this. Otherwise, I'll tackle it probably similar to how I would in Perl or other such approaches I've taken before.
I was thinking along the lines of using OpenURI to open each url, then if input is HTML collect links to crawl, otherwise process the data. I would use String.scan to break apart the file appropriately each time into a multi-dimensional array parsing each component based on the established formatting by the data provider. Upon completion, push the data into the database. Move on to next input file/uri. Rinse and repeat.
I figure I must be missing some libs that those with more experience would use to clean/quicken this process up dramatically and make the script much more flexible for reuse on other data sets.
Additionally, I will be graphing and visualizing this data as well as generating reports, so perhaps that should too be considered.
Any input as to perhaps a better approach or libs to simply this?
Your question focuses on a lot on "low level" details -- parsing URL's and so on. One key aspect of the "Ruby Way" is "Don't reinvent the wheel." Leverage existing libraries. :)
My recommendation? First, leverage a crawler such as spider or anemone. Second, use Nokogiri for HTML/XML parsing. Third, store the results. I recommend this because you might do different analyses later and you don't want to throw away the hard work of your spidering.
Without knowing too much about your constraints, I would look at storing your results in MongoDB. After thinking this, I did a quick search and found a nice tutorial Scraping a blog with Anemone and MongoDB.
I've written probably a bajillion spiders and site analyzers and find that Ruby has some nice tools that should make this an easy process.
OpenURI makes it easy to retrieve pages.
URI.extract makes it easy to find links in pages. From the docs:
Description
Extracts URIs from a string. If block given, iterates through all matched URIs. Returns nil if block given or array with matches.
require "uri"
URI.extract("text here http://foo.example.org/bla and here mailto:test#example.com and here also.")
# => ["http://foo.example.com/bla", "mailto:test#example.com"]
Simple, untested, logic to start might look like:
require "openuri"
require "uri"
urls_to_scan = %w[
http://www.example.com/page1
http://www.example.com/page2
]
loop do
break if urls_to_scan.empty?
url = urls_to_scan.shift
html = open(url).read
# you probably want to do something to make sure the URLs are not
# pointing outside the site you're walking.
#
# Something like:
#
# URI.extract(html).select{ |u| u[%r{^http://www\.example\.com}i] }
#
new_urls = URI.extract(html)
if (new_urls.any?)
urls_to_scan += new_urls
else
; # parse your file as data using the content in html
end
end
Unless you own the site you're crawling, you want to be kind and gentle: Don't run as fast as possible because it's not your pipe. Pay attention to the site's robot.txt file or risk being banned.
There are true web-crawler gems for Ruby, but the basic task is so simple I never bother with them. If you want to check out other alternatives, visit some of the links to the right for other questions on SO that touch on this subject.
If you need more power or flexibility, the Nokogiri gem makes short work of parsing HTML, allowing you to use CSS accessors to search for tags of interest. There are some pretty powerful gems for making it easy to grab pages such as typhoeus.
Finally, while ActiveRecord, which is recommended in some comments, is nice, finding documentation for using it outside of Rails can be difficult or confusing. I recommend using Sequel. It is a great ORM, very flexible, and well documented.
Hi I would start by taking a very close look at the gem called Mechanize before firing up any basic open-uri stuff - cause it's build into mechanize. It's a brilliant, fast, and easy to use gem for automating web-crawling. Since your data-format is pretty strange (at least compared to json, xml or html) I don't think you will make any use of the build-in parser - but you could still take a look at it. it's called nokogiri and is extremely smart as well. But in the last end, after crawling and fetching the resources, you will probably have to go with some good old regular expression stuff.
Good luck!
I am reading some data from an XML webservice with Ruby, something like this:
<phrases>
<phrase language="en_US">¡I'm highly annoyed with character references!</phrase>
</phrases>
I'm parsing the XML and grabbing an array of phrases. As you can see, the phrase text contains some XML character entity references. I'd like to replace them with the actual character being referenced. This is simple enough with the numeric references, but nasty with the XML and HTML ones. I'd like to avoid having a big hash in my code that holds the character for each XML or HTML character reference, i.e. http://www.java2s.com/Code/Java/XML/Resolvesanentityreferenceorcharacterreferencetoitsvalue.htm
Surely there's a library for this out there, right?
Update
Yes, there is a library out there, and it's called HTMLEntities:
: jmglov#laurana; sudo gem install htmlentities
Successfully installed htmlentities-4.2.4
: jmglov#laurana; irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'htmlentities'
=> []
irb(main):002:0> HTMLEntities.new.decode "¡I'm highly annoyed with character references!"
=> "¡I'm highly annoyed with character references!"
REXML can do it, though it won't handle "¡" or " ". The list of predefined XML entities (aside from Unicode numeric entities) is actually quite small. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references
Given this input XML:
<phrases>
<phrase language="en_US">"I'm highly annoyed with character references!©</phrase>
</phrases>
you can parse the XML and the embedded entities like this (for example):
require 'rexml/document'
doc = REXML::Document.new(File.open('/tmp/foo.xml').readlines.join(''))
phrase = REXML::XPath.first(doc, '//phrases/phrase')
text = phrase.first # Type is REXML::Text
puts(text.value)
Obviously, that example assumes that the XML is in file /tmp/foo.xml. You can just as easily pass a string of XML. On my Mac and Ubuntu systems, running it produces:
$ ruby /tmp/foo.rb
"I'm highly annoyed with character references!©
This isn't an attempt to provide a solution, it's to relate some of my own experiences dealing with XML from the wild. I was using Perl at first, then later using Ruby, and the experiences are something you can encounter easily if you grab enough XML or RDF/RSS/Atom feeds.
I've often seen XML CDATA contain HTML, both encoded and unencoded. The encoded HTML was probably the result of someone doing things the right way, via some API or library to generate XML. The unencoded HTML was probably someone using a script to wrap the HTML with tags, resulting in invalid XML, but I had to deal with it anyway.
I've also seen XML CDATA containing HTML that had been encoded multiple times, requiring me to unencode everything, even after the XML engine had done its thing. Sometimes during an intermediate pass I'd suddenly have non-UTF8 characters in the string along with encoded ones, as a result of someone appending comments or joining multiple HTML streams together that were from different character-sets. For whatever the reason, it was really ugly and caused XML parsing to break or emit a lot of warnings. I'd have to loop over the content, decoding and checking to see if the previous pass was the same as the current decoding pass, and bailing if nothing had changed. There was no guarantee I'd have a string in a valid character-set at the time though, so I'd have to tell iconv to convert it to UTF8 and throw away characters that wouldn't convert cleanly.
Nokogiri can decode the content of a node various ways, by creative use of the to_xml and to_html methods. You can also look at the HTMLEntities gem, Loofah, and others to go after the CDATA contents. Loofah is nice because it's designed to whitelist/blacklist tags you might encounter.
The XML spec is supposed to protect us from such shenanigans, but, as one of my co-workers used to tell me, "We can make it fool-proof, but not damn-fool-proof". People are SO inventive and the specs mean nothing to someone who didn't bother to read them or doesn't care.
I want to parse a continuous stream of bytes (from a socket) with a state machine using Ragel
However, all the Examples I have found are either parsing a complete file in one pass (like the Gherkin lexer or are using Ragels C Target (like the mongrel HTTP1.1 Parser)
I'm looking for some advice or examples on how to instantiate a Ragel State machine and then add bytes to it, keeping the existing state intact.
The final interface I am looking for is something like:
parser = MyStreamParser.new(Grammar)
parser.on_token { |t| puts t.inspect }
# I can't parse lines seperately because tokens can span multiple lines.
$stdin.each_line do |line|
parser.add(line)
end
Any advice on how to do that in Ragel is greatly appreciated. I'd rather use that than code another state machine by hand.
Maybe Ragel is not the right tool? If not: What should I use instead?
At first glance, Ragel doesn't look very Ruby-like. Have you taken a look at Statemachine? It looks like you can feed the state machine events (characters, in your problem) one at a time.
It may not be exactly what you are looking for, but Dhaka is another decent parser generator to take a look at. I'm not sure that will help, but it has served me well in the past.