Translate Javascript to Ruby

Question

How do I convert the following JavaScript code into Ruby?

xmlhttp = GetXmlHttpObject();
xmlhttp.open("POST", "valid_from_f_nav.asp", false)
str="<package><username>"+ username + "</username><password>" + password + "</password></package>";
xmlhttp.send(str)
str = xmlhttp.responseText;

I need to keep the cookies I receive from the HTTP POST request.

• Lazarus: Please post the ruby code you have tried and explain how it's failing rather than looking for someone else to do this for you.
• philosodad: What you have posted here is syntactically correct Ruby, so I'm not sure exactly what your question is?
• tokland: @philosodad: almost, but you'd need an extra ".new" to create the instance.
• the Tin Man: As a stylistic thing, in Ruby semicolons closing a statement are optional unless multiple statements are on the same line. So, in your example code, any use of ; at a line end is wasted and, for readability should be removed to get rid of some line-noise.
• philosodad: @tokland: true, unless GetXmlHttpObject is the name of a method that returns a new object, perhaps a one of a selection based on context.

Answer 1

Ruby's Mechanize gem is probably a good starting point. It supports POST, along with automatically providing a cookie jar. It's built on top of the Nokogiri XML/HTML parser, so once you've retrieved the page or data you can easily navigate it to extract out the interesting bits.

Look through the docs, and if you need additional information edit your original question and add the URL you're working with, plus sample code and we'll try to help.

Answer 2

Can you post some code? 2 hints: rest-client + ActiveSupport's Hash#to_xml. Probably you'll need one line of code.