How to I GET an XML page and parse it into a Ruby hash in Rails?

Question

Assuming my xml response is at example.com/query , how do I parse it into a Ruby hash without using external dependencies like Nokogiri?

Also, and not really part of the question, why would anyone use XML?

Answer 1

This is trivial:

require 'open-uri'

url = 'example.com/query'
h = Hash.from_xml(open url)

This example needs Hash#from_xml from Rail's active_support/core_ext/hash and will not work with Vanilla Ruby.