https://format-express.dev/blog Technical articles about Ruby, Rails, formatting and more... Format Express 2026. All rights reserved. Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:46:21 +0200 1440 Inside an XML document, characters can be referenced by their unicode code point. How to unescape these notations in a Ruby application ? https://format-express.dev/blog/how-to-unescape-xml-character-entities how-to-unescape-xml-character-entities Fri, 3 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000 I worked on many web applications which relied on other Web Services (some XML Soap, some JSON Rest API, some custom-made ones...). The ability to check the current and past behavior of these WS was very important, as they were a prime source of trouble. Having extensive and readable logs of the WS requests helps to rapidly identify a broken WS and redirect a ticket to the right team, providing them meaningful information. In this article, I share my recommendations for efficient logging of Web Services calls. https://format-express.dev/blog/efficient-logging-of-ws-requests efficient-logging-of-ws-requests Wed, 18 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000 How to use a WebSocket to report the client-side JavaScript errors of a web application, and take advantage of this new channel to monitor the user's activity as well. https://format-express.dev/blog/how-to-track-client-side-javascript-errors how-to-track-client-side-javascript-errors Tue, 20 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000 Automated testing for a formatter like Format Express is as straightforward as you'd expect : given a JSON or XML extract, check the formatter returns the expected formatted output. In this article, I show you how to create a nice collection of tests by putting each test in its own data file. https://format-express.dev/blog/collection-of-data-files-for-automated-tests collection-of-data-files-for-automated-tests Sat, 3 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000 In this article, I show how to embed a gem into a Ruby on Rails project and enable autoreload for the gem's classes in the development environment. https://format-express.dev/blog/embed-a-gem-in-a-rails-project-and-enable-autoreload embed-a-gem-in-a-rails-project-and-enable-autoreload Sun, 21 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 This article explains how to integrate a Flex scanner into Ruby code. To illustrate this, I show step by step how to create a gem containing a basic JSON parser using Flex rules. https://format-express.dev/blog/ruby-tokenization-with-flex ruby-tokenization-with-flex Wed, 10 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000