Parse remote APIs (JSON and XML) using Rails 3

Question

I am coding an app that is will be fetching data from different sources around the Internet via their respective API (JSON and XML).

How can I fetch this data (from remote source) and parse it using Rails 3? I looked everywhere on the net for a solution but it all seems very confusing too me.

Do anyone know of a good, simple gem that I can use for remote APIs? It was so simple in PHP.

DanSingerman · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-22 12:19:20Z

31

Try something like this for JSON

require 'open-uri'
require 'json'

result = JSON.parse(open("url_of_json_service").read)

See more abut the JSON gem here: http://flori.github.com/json/

Try something like this for XML

require 'open-uri'
require 'nokogiri'

result = Nokogiri.XML(open("url_of_xml_service").read)

See more about Nokogiri here: https://github.com/tenderlove/nokogiri (there are other XML parsers)

answered Feb 22, 2011 at 12:19

DanSingerman

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7 Comments

Jonathan Clark Over a year ago

Thank you! One more thing. How can I display the results on the front end page? I.e loop through the results in Rails 3?

DanSingerman Over a year ago

Assuming the returned data is an array, then a normal ruby each loop should suffice.

Jonathan Clark Over a year ago

It is returned as this: {"created_in":0.046152,"statuses":[40036896721608704,40036681583169536,40036632468004864,40036552943996928,40036376992944128]}

Jonathan Clark Over a year ago

When I try this I get the error: undefined method `statuses' for #<Hash:0xb6d06cac>

DanSingerman Over a year ago

I think you better read the Nokogiri documentation for that (it is a little more complex than JSON, but then so is the data format) see nokogiri.org/tutorials

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Sachin Prasad · Accepted Answer · 2014-05-26 08:07:18Z

1

Savon is a nice gem which will do the work for SOAP based requests(XML). Check out its documentation.

Here is a Railscast for understanding better.

For JSON based requests you can check @DanSingerman answer.

answered May 26, 2014 at 8:07

Sachin Prasad

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