Bear Den Designs

Google-Geocode Gem Woe's

While using the very cool google-geocode gem for ruby, I ran into a small (read: big) problem.

Do a search for “Trinidad” by itself and you get something like:

Communication error: #<REXML::ParseException: Missing end tag for 'AdministrativeAreaName' (got "AdministrativeArea")

The problem lies not in the gem but in ruby’s REXML and how it deals with the xml google sends back. This only happens when international characters are involved.

After doing a little googling I saw a patch for rexml which I changed into a monkey patch for google-geocodes helper library rc-rest.

This monkey patch will solve all your accent mark woe’s.

class RCRest
  
  def get(method, params = {})
    url = make_url method, params

    url.open do |xml|
      body = xml.read

      res = REXML::Document.new Iconv.conv("UTF-8//Ignore", 'UTF-8', body)
  
      check_error res

      return parse_response(res)
    end
  rescue IOError, SystemCallError, SocketError, Timeout::Error,
         REXML::ParseException => e
    raise CommunicationError.new(e)
  rescue OpenURI::HTTPError => e
    begin
      xml = REXML::Document.new e.io.read
      check_error xml
    rescue REXML::ParseException => e
    end
    new_e = CommunicationError.new e
    new_e.message << "\n\nunhandled error:\n#{xml.to_s}"
    raise new_e
  end
  
end

The magical change is the inclusion of Iconv to make REXML happy.

mysql gem and Leopard not playing nicely

Just installed the latest mysql for os x Leopard. Re-installed the mysql gem using:

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

All seemed to go well but when trying to rake test I got:

dyld: NSLinkModule() error dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.15.dylib Referenced from: /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle Reason: image not found Trace/BPT trap

Crap!

The gem is looking in the wrong place for the dylib!

Fix

sudo mkdir /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql
sudo ln -s /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.15.dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.15.dylib