Reputation: 13548

Is there a way to select html elements with a certain class with ruby?

If I use

require 'net/http'

source = Net::HTTP.get('stackoverflow.com', '/index.html')

to extract the source code from a url, is there a way, in ruby, to find all link elements with a certain class, and then to extract the href attribute of those urls and put them in an array? (I know how I would do this in javascript but not in ruby.)

Perhaps I do not want to use net/http?

Upvotes: 0

Answers (6)

Michael Kohl

Reputation: 66837

Sounds to me like Nokogiri would be perfect for you.

require 'nokogiri'
require 'openuri'

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open('http://stackoverflow.com/index.html'))
doc.xpath('//h3/a[@class="foo"]').each do |element|
  # do something with element
end

Upvotes: 4

Vadim Golub

Reputation: 1755

require 'open-uri'
require 'hpricot'

source = open('stackoverflow.com/index.html').read # get raw html

doc = Hpricot(source) # parse with Hpricot
links = doc.search("//a[@class~='foo_bar']").collect { |a| a[:href] } # search for all links with 'foo_bar' class and then collect array of links

NB: code is not optimized, so read Hpricot documentation if you'd like to improve it ;)

Upvotes: 1