How would I construct a Hash from this scenario in Ruby? - ruby

Question

Given I have the following code:
ENDPOINT = 'http://api.eventful.com'
API_KEY = 'PbFVZfjTXJQWrnJp'
def get_xml(url, options={})
compiled_url = "#{ENDPOINT}/rest#{url}" << "?app_key=#{API_KEY}&sort_order=popularity"
options.each { |k, v| compiled_url << "&#{k.to_s}=#{v.to_s}" }
REXML::Document.new((Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse(URI.escape(compiled_url)))))
end
def event_search(location, date)
get_xml('/events/search',
:location => "#{location}, United Kingdom",
:date => date
)
end
And we access the XML data formatted by REXML::Document like this:
events = event_search('London', 'Today').elements
And we can access these elements like this (this prints all the titles in the events):
events.each('search/events/event/title') do |title|
puts title.text
end
The XML I'm using can be found here. I would like this construct a Hash like so:
{"Title1" => {:title => 'Title1', :date => 'Date1', :post_code => 'PostCode1'},
"Title2" => {:title => 'Title2', :date => 'Date2', :post_code => 'PostCode2'}}
When using events.each('search/events/event/title'), events.each('search/events/event/date'), and events.each('search/events/event/post_code').
So I want to create a Hash from the XML provided by the URL I have included above. Thanks!

Answer 1

You should loop over the events themselves, not the titles. Something like this
events_by_title = {}
elements.each('search/events/event') do |event|
title = event.get_elements('title').first.text
events_by_title[title] = {
:title => title,
:date => event.get_elements('start_time').first.text
:post_code => event.get_elements('postal_code').first.text,
}
end

Answer 2

Get the root element using root() on the REXML:Document object then use each_element("search/events/event") to iterate over "event" node. You can then extract the different values out of it using the different methods on element: http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.3/libdoc/rexml/rdoc/REXML/Element.html