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I’ve had a handful of e-mail about the Hpricot gem not working. And here’s the code that’s cited:

 require 'rubygems'
 require_gem 'hpricot'

If you’re on Ruby-Talk or RubyGems-Devel, this has been circulating since late last year, but it’s still a bit of hazy folklore really. The thing is: require_gem doesn’t do what you think it does. At least, now that autorequire is deprecated.

There was a time when autorequire would let you set a script which would be loaded when require_gem gets called. In the case of Hpricots previous, you call require_gem 'hpricot' and then the gem gets loaded and its lib/hpricot.rb as well.

But these days it’s kosher to say:

 require 'rubygems'
 require_gem 'hpricot', '>=0.4'
 require 'hpricot'

So require_gem doesn’t load any scripts. It just lets us set up specifically what gem we’ll be using. If you’re just using the latest Hpricot, go:

 require 'rubygems'
 require 'hpricot'

At least, from what I’ve read, that’s the new science.