[LRUG] Meeting August 8th and September 4th

[A. S. Bradbury]

On Monday 14 August 2006 16:25, Robert McKinnon wrote:>
> Alex, sounds like a great topic for an LRUG talk! Are you able to make
> a Sept 4th meeting, 18:30-20:00? (Note: this may be moved to the
> following week).

Yes, I should be able to make either that or the next week, and hopefully many 
more LRUG meetings in the future.

> > I could certainly talk about the ideas behind my system,
> > compare and contrast with alternative approaches (Regexp,
> > RubyfulSoup and now Hpricot). Maybe there's interest in a
> > brief look at what tools and resources I've found useful,
> > being a relatively inexperienced ruby programming
> > embarking on what is for me a fairly substantial project.
> >
> > Is there any interest in this, if so - what would you like to hear
> > about? I'm not familiar with the style of most presentations at
> > LRUG meetings.
>
> We usually get around 30 people at a meeting - a mix of experienced to
> newbies. We've been having two talks per meeting for the last few
> months. You'll have a projector and the audience's attention for around
> 30-40 minutes - they'll want to head to the pub after that! ;)

OK. 

> For a personal project I've been converting HTML to XML with TagSoup (a
> Java tool), then using a series of custom REXML SAX parsers to
> transform the data into a useful structure. The resulting structured
> data is going into a database for a Rails app I'm building. I'd be
> interested to see if Ariel would have saved me any time.

It's not the answer to all problems, but I think it could well have helped you 
out. I'm no zealot, it's just something else for the toolkit. Sometimes 
you'll want to take the time to right a parser by hand. It's under heavy 
development at the moment, but keep an eye out on ruby-talk for the next 
release which should be where it starts to become very useful. Of course, 
I'll be filling you in on the details on the 4th/whenever.

Alex