hi

I'm new to ruby and this list, so please forgive me if this is a silly 
question but:

Is it possible to create an object of a specific type when all I have is the 
name of the class in a string? 

I'm wanting to serialize objects to XML, but I need to have the type 
information stored in the XML and create objects of a type based on that 
information. I have looked at the clxmlserial library but it needs to know 
the type when re-creating objects. I have tried making a class 
XmlSerializableObject with _dump and _load methods for use with Marshal, but 
the type information is still stored in a non-xml format at the start of the 
file. Do I need to write a module in c to do this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated,
-- 
George Mochrie
aka Drasil
ICQ# 84423409