Text Processing with Ruby

XML

Although JSON has become perhaps the most common serialization format—in certain circles, anyway—that’s not been wholly at the expense of XML. Many APIs still return it and expect it as input; many applications use it for configuration and storage. At some point, you will definitely need to write XML.

XML as a Tree

XML is fundamentally a representation of a tree. There is a root node, which has children, which may also have children, and so on down a hierarchy of arbitrary depth.

If we represented information about a car, for example, we might end up with XML that looks like this:

Our root node is car, representing ...