Iterate all children with a given name using GPathResult returned by XmlSlurper
I've parsed some html using XmlSlurper. Now I want to iterate all the children with a given element name.
What I've got now is the following code snippet
html.'**'.findAll { it.name() == 'a' }.each {
println it
}
It works but just isn't groovy enough. I would like to simply write something like this
html.'**'.a.each {
println it
}
If I do it this way, GPath complains that there is no property with name 'a'. Any idea if there is an easy syntax to formulate this iteration?
Answer
Unfortunately, there is currently no way in Groovy to perform what you're asking.
When you perform such operation on a GPathResult (or any of its children)
html."**".a.b.c
What is done is that for each "." a call to the GPathResult.getProperty() method is made. And this method as only a few valid syntactic sugar (*, **, .. and @). This means that if you don't use one of them, it assume that the property really exist for each node you're targeting.
If you would like to have a conditional null-safe operator for traversing your tree, it would request either the addition of a syntactic sugar prefix (e.g. "?a" ) in the GPathResult class. Maybe that you can achieve that using the expando metaclass and overriding the getProperty method, but I did not try it.