CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubynokogiri
Just a learner
Just a learner

Reputation: 28632

How do I use Nokogiri to parse this HTML?

I have an HTML document like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Page Title</title>
<style type="text/css">
</style>
</head>
<body>

<div class="section">
    <table>
        <tr>
            <td>this_is_what_i_want</td><td>this_is_what_i_want</
td><td>test</td><td>test</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>this_is_what_i_want</td><td>this_is_what_i_want</
td><td>test</td><td>test</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>this_is_what_i_want</td><td>this_is_what_i_want</
td><td>test</td><td>test</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>this_is_what_i_want</td><td>this_is_what_i_want</
td><td>test</td><td>test</td>
        </tr>
    </table>
</div>

<div class="section">
    <table>
        <tr>
            <td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td>
        </tr>
    </table>
</div>

<div class="section">
    <table>
        <tr>
            <td>this_is_what_i_want</td><td>this_is_what_i_want</
td><td>test</td><td>test</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>this_is_what_i_want</td><td>this_is_what_i_want</
td><td>test</td><td>test</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>this_is_what_i_want</td><td>this_is_what_i_want</
td><td>test</td><td>test</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>this_is_what_i_want</td><td>this_is_what_i_want</
td><td>test</td><td>test</td>
        </tr>
    </table>
</div>

</body>
</html>

I want to get the first two td elements in all rows of the first and third table element. How to get this result?

Note that the two td elements in a row have some relation and you can't treat all td elements the same way. For example, how do I concatenate the content of the two td elements in a row?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 298

Answers (2)

Mark Thomas
Mark Thomas

Reputation: 37527

It can also be done using two XPath statements:

doc.xpath('//div[position()=1 or position()=3]/table/tr').map {|row| row.xpath('concat(//td[1]," ",//td[2])')}

The reason it can't be done in a single XPath statement is that the String XPath functions work on the first node of a nodeset only. You can do node selection or concatenation but not both.

Note that in XPath 2.0, it can be done using the string-join() function but Nokogiri supports only XPath 1.0.

Upvotes: 2

pguardiario
pguardiario

Reputation: 55002

doc.xpath('//div[position()=1 or position()=3]/table/tr').map{|tr| tr.css('td')[0..1].map(&:text).join(' ')}

Upvotes: 2

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