Script to analyze the structure of an xml document

While working with XML data, you often don’t find the WSDL files and may end up manually working through the document to understand its structure. At my current project I ran into a few hundred XML files and had to analyze them to understand the data available. Here is a script I created which prints all the possible nodes in the input files

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#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# Author: Khaja Minhajuddin <minhajuddin.k@gmail.com>

require 'nokogiri'

class XmlAnalyze
  def initialize(filepaths)
    @filepaths = filepaths
    @node_paths = {}
  end

  def analyze
    @filepaths.each { |filepath| analyze_file(filepath) }
    @node_paths.keys.sort
  end

  private
  def analyze_file(filepath)
    @doc = File.open(filepath) { |f| Nokogiri::XML(f) }
    analyze_node(@doc.children.first)
  end

  def analyze_node(node)
    return if node.is_a? Nokogiri::XML::Text
    add_path node.path

    node.attributes.keys.each do |attr|
      add_path("#{node.path}:#{attr}")
    end

    node.children.each do |child|
      analyze_node(child)
    end

  end

  def add_path(path)
    path = path.gsub(/\[\d+\]/, '')
    @node_paths[path] = true
  end
end

if ARGV.empty?
  puts 'Usage: ./analyze_xml.rb file1.xml file2.xml ....'
  exit(-1)
end

puts XmlAnalyze.new(ARGV).analyze

It outputs the following for the xml below

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<root>
  <person>
    <name type="full">Khaja</name>
    <age>31</age>
  </person>
  <person>
    <name type="full">Khaja</name>
    <dob>Jan</dob>
  </person>
</root>
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/root
/root/person
/root/person/age
/root/person/dob
/root/person/name
/root/person/name:type

Hope you find it useful!

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