It seems that many projects dont give much thought to how a gem might work on environments other than linux/osx.

So for a lot of gems, i end up downloading dll’s separately and putting them into my C:\Ruby\bin directory to make things work.

I was using Scrapi and noticed that it tries to package Tidy with it rather than relying on “require ‘tidy’” so my usual dll trick didnt work, and when i tried to run some code i would see an error about “libtidy.so” not being a valid windows object file. You dont say…

So i did some digging, and i can see that in the “find_tidy()” method in reader.rb, Scrapi tries to set the Tidy path. But its coded wrongly.

Since the Scrapi gem ships with both a linux “.so” and a windows “.dll” the windows dll will never be found before the linux “.so” according to the strategy in “find_tidy()”.

def find_tidy()
return if Tidy.path
begin
Tidy.path = File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), “../tidy”, “libtidy.so”)
rescue LoadError
begin
Tidy.path = File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), “../tidy”, “libtidy.dll”)
rescue LoadError
Tidy.path = File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), “../tidy”, “libtidy.dylib”)
end
end
end

I suggest you use a platform detection mechanism like so:

“RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /mswin32/”

And then the code will play more nicely. Otherwise, just stick to “require ‘tidy’”, atleast then Scrapi will only have the same problem that all the other gems do :)