I would suggest that you look at xml-simple on RAA 
(http://raa.ruby-lang.org/, direct link: 
http://www.maik-schmidt.de/projects/xml-simple/). It is based on top of 
REXML (pure Ruby xml parser) that transforms an XML input into a ruby 
hash. It is extremely easy to manipulate and the resulting hash can be 
easily dumped back to XML.

I am not sure about performance, however I do not believe it should be 
an issue.

Gennady.

On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 07:17 PM, Joao Barros wrote:

> Dear Ruby users,
>
> I am (still) ignorant about Ruby, but, from the very few things I
> read, it seems a very nice language. I would like to know some
> opinions regarding Ruby's suitability to parse XML files into an
> internal Ruby representation so that they can be manipulated by Ruby
> code and then written down to a new XML file.
> Is it a good idea to do it in Ruby? What about efficiency? Should I do
> it with C++ (with lots of templates ;-|) ? I already know quite a bit
> (?) of C++ and that is the reason why I am also considering it.
>
> Thanks a lot in advance for any opinions. I need them!
>
> Joao
>