Note that this post is for folks who are new to ruby. I have to admit a lot of geospatial developers have not been using ruby due to the poor support for geo libraries in ruby – so it’s understandable. In this post I will show how to start parsing the FOSS4G 2009 Schedule. Lets start by gathering our tools. I am going to assume you have ruby installed. If you don’t have Ruby install, don’t fret there are now one-click installers – yes even for windows: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/.

Reading YAML: The first thing we will need to do is to read the ‘official’ FOSS4G schedule YAML file that’s hosted at http://2009.foss4g.org/schedule.yml – as of writing this it contains data for workshops and tutorials. We will connect to the url using OpenURI module which is part of Ruby’s standard-lib. So lets try something simple, like reading the data into a Hash:

The data from the schedule is now loaded into the hash named data. If you are not familiar with ruby hashes checkout the class docs http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Hash.html also if you listen to the surreal voice in these videos you will fall in love with hashes forever – don’t say i didn’t warn you.

Ok moving on, lets poke around this data structure containing the FOSS4G schedule. Lets say I want to iterate over each tutorial and workshop then create an ical entry that we can share with our friends – so they know which sessions they may be interested in attending. Useful eh? – OK maybe not that much but it’s a start. The code for iteration would look something like this:

Next I’ll show you how to create an iCal entry and perhaps email it to your friends.