know if a tag is empty or not

[jlecour]

Let's say I have an XML snippet like this :

<article>
  <title>My Title</title>
  <author/>
</article>

and this mapping :

class Author
  include ROXML

  xml_reader :whatever
end

class Article
  include ROXML

  xml_reader :title
  xml_reader :author, :as => Author
end

Is it possible to know that the author is present without looking inside?
I wish I could something like this

article = Article.from_xml(xml)
puts article.author.whatever if article.author.present?

Thanks for this really great gem. I use it a lot, and am very happy with it.

[lostapathy]

It appears this works with current versions of the gem. This script outputs what you'd expect:

require 'rubygems'
require 'roxml'

class Author
  include ROXML

  xml_reader :whatever
end

class Article
  include ROXML

  xml_reader :title
  xml_reader :author, :as => Author
end

xml = "<article>  <title>My Title</title><author/></article>"
xml2 = "<article>  <title>My Title</title></article>"

article = Article.from_xml(xml)
puts "present" if article.author.present?

article2 = Article.from_xml(xml2)
puts "not present" unless article2.author.present?

If I'm missing something there please let me know. Otherwise (or if you've long since moved on) I think we can probably close this issue.