google-spreadsheet-ruby and (Nokogiri::XML::XPath::SyntaxError)

I have a Ruby script that update our Google Doc spreadsheet as part of releases. The script has been working for years, then suddenly started failing with errors like this one:


/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/nokogiri-1.5.2/lib/nokogiri/xml/node.rb:159:in `evaluate': Invalid expression: .//xmlns:link[@xmlns:@rel = 'http://schemas.google.com/spreadsheets/2006#cellsfeed'] (Nokogiri::XML::XPath::SyntaxError)
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/nokogiri-1.5.2/lib/nokogiri/xml/node.rb:159:in `block in xpath'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/nokogiri-1.5.2/lib/nokogiri/xml/node.rb:150:in `map'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/nokogiri-1.5.2/lib/nokogiri/xml/node.rb:150:in `xpath'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/nokogiri-1.5.2/lib/nokogiri/xml/node.rb:214:in `css'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/google-spreadsheet-ruby-0.1.6/lib/google_spreadsheet.rb:648:in `block in worksheets'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/nokogiri-1.5.2/lib/nokogiri/xml/node_set.rb:239:in `block in each'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/nokogiri-1.5.2/lib/nokogiri/xml/node_set.rb:238:in `upto'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/nokogiri-1.5.2/lib/nokogiri/xml/node_set.rb:238:in `each'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/google-spreadsheet-ruby-0.1.6/lib/google_spreadsheet.rb:646:in `worksheets'
from /home/tin/bin/google-spreadsheet:125:in `

'

It took a bit of sleuthing to find out that Nokogiri version 1.5.2 broke google-spreadsheet-ruby. Downgrading to v 1.5.0 made it work again.

I am documenting it here for those of you running into similar problems.

Addtions. It turns out nokogiri and google-spreadsheet gems are written by same author, and he is aware of the bug, but not fixing it at this time. He recommends using nokogiri v1.5.0

https://github.com/gimite/google-spreadsheet-ruby/issues/31#issuecomment-4451659

Google-fu show a solution, since I can’t keep gems from updating on my systems. I just have to force my script to request a particular version.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2693862/how-do-i-require-a-specific-version-of-a-ruby-gem

And here is how I solved my problem.


gem 'nokogiri', '=1.5.0'

require 'optparse'
require 'ostruct'
require 'csv'
require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'google_spreadsheet'