Hpricot Strange behaviour

I have a rather strange problem !!

I am using hpricot as an XML parser in my ruby/rails application In my local mac developing environment (rails 2.3.2, ruby 1.8.6, msql 2.7, hpricot 1.8.1) everything works fine. However, when I deployed my application on a shared linux server using the same hpricot, rails and ruby version hpricot does not work any more. My XML file is an UTF8 file with some special characters (åäö). It has been generated from an ansel file. On the server hpricot missis tags that are present in the XML file. The XML file has some strange line breaks, but that works locally.

I try to get out the information using the following calls to hpricot

     source= (xml/"/gedcom/HEAD/SOUR").inner_text.nil_or.to_s #SOURCE      file_created_at=(xml/"/gedcom/HEAD/DATE").inner_text.nil_or.to_s #DATE      version=(xml/"/gedcom/HEAD/GEDC").inner_text.nil_or.to_s #VERSION      version+= (xml/"/gedcom/HEAD/CHAR").inner_text.nil_or.to_s #VERSION      source_file= (xml/"/gedcom/HEAD/FILE").inner_text.nil_or.to_s #FILE      description= (xml/"/gedcom/HEAD/NOTE").inner_text.nil_or.to_s #DESCR      contributor=(xml/"/gedcom/SUBM").inner_text.nil_or.to_s #SUBMITTER

but it can only find source. It finds file_created_at but the inner_text expands over many tags. It also finds contributor but then the inner_text consists of th whole file. Note, that i my local environment the code works without problems

Any idees, any suggestion ??? I would appreciate any help ?