intertwingly

Like with REXML, I ported XML Builder to run on Ruby version 1.9.  As there is likely to be an extended transition period between 1.8 and 2.0, the design goal was to build a single library that supports both.

Major:

• As Ruby 1.9’s support for regular expressions is fully unicode aware, tr and Regexp are used in place of pack and unpack.  Should be a major performance win, especially with big strings.
• no more need for String.to_xs and Fixnum.xchr
• move from BlankSlate to BasicObject.  As it doesn’t include ::Kernel, BasicObject is much more brutal than BlankSlate.  Constants like ::String must be explicitly qualified, as do methods like ::Kernel.raise and ::Kernel.block_given?
• Since the use of $KCODE produces warnings on Ruby 1.9, this support has been removed from Builder when running on Ruby 1.9.  New default (absent $KCODE) switches from “doesn’t understand utf-8” to “supports utf-8”.  This means that there will be fewer cases where non-ASCII characters are replaced with XML numeric character references.

Minor:

• trend is towards replacing assert_raises with assert_raise
• instance_methods are no longer an array of strings, instead it is an array of symbols.  Replace instance_methods.include? with method_defined?

Uninvestigated/Todo:

• Builder::CSS relies on instance_eval.  BasicObject support for this method is under active discussion.  Update: done.
• what is the equivalent to rake/contrib/sshpublisher in Ruby 1.9?. Updated: solved.
• how this affects alternative implementations like JRuby and IronRuby
• use U+FFFD instead of * to indicate invalid Unicode characters
• need to stop the blankslate (and for now, css) tests from running on 1.9
• integrating this patch

Updated: Patch, Gem