Creating Ruby Hash from XML

Question

I have an XML doc that looks like this (and contains hundreds of these entries):

<entry name="entryname">
  <serial>1234567</serial>
  <hostname>host1</hostname>
  <ip-address>100.200.300.400</ip-address>
  <mac-address>00-00-00-00</mac-address>
</entry>

ansible_hash is a hash that I will use as a basis for a dynamic ansible inventory, and has a structure as on the Ansible website:

ansible_hash = {
  "_meta" => {"hostvars" => {}},
  "all" => {
    "children" => ["ungrouped"]
  },
  "ungrouped" => {}
}

I'm trying to use Nokogiri to retrieve the hostname from the XML doc, and add it to ansible_hash. I would like to have each of the hostnames to be appended to the array under the "hosts" key. How can I achieve this?

When I do this,

xml_doc = Nokogiri::XML(File.open("file.xml", "r"))
xml_doc.xpath("//entry//hostname").each do |entry|
  ansible_hash["all"] = ansible_hash["all"].merge("hosts" => ["#{entry.inner_text}"])
end

the entry under "all" => {"hosts" => []} only has the last one like this:

{
  "_meta" => {"hostvars"=>{}},
  "all" => {
    "children" => ["ungrouped"],
    "hosts" => ["host200"]
  },
  "ungrouped" => {}
}

halfelf · Accepted Answer · 2018-11-30 08:18:18Z

5

ansible_hash['all']['hosts'] = []
xml_doc.xpath("//entry//hostname").each do |entry|
  ansible_hash['all']['hosts'] << entry.inner_text
end

The reason your code not working:

You're trying to merge two hashes with a same key hosts in each block, and the latter one's k/v will overwrite the previous one.

The behavior you need is to append something into an array, so just focus on it and forget about merge hashes.

answered Nov 30, 2018 at 8:18

halfelf

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3 Comments

iGian Over a year ago

Shouldn't it be ansible_hash['all']['hosts'] = [entry.inner_text]?

Jay Dorsey Over a year ago

@iGian the << appends each host in the block, = would overwrite each and leave only the last entry.

engineersmnky Over a year ago

any reason we don't just go with ansible_hash['all']['hosts'] = xml_doc.xpath("//entry//hostname").map(&:inner_text)

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