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**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [June 5, 2006, 11:25am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-parsing-libraries/95526 "2006-06-05T11:25:54Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 7\
**Page:** 1
**Author:**  [@hariraj](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/hariraj)\
**Post date:** [June 5, 2006, 11:25am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-parsing-libraries/95526/1 "2006-06-05T11:25:54Z")
Hi,
What is the best way to parse HTML?
Or is there a simple way to convert a table to an array?
I tried beautiful\_soup and the built-in htmltools, but have trouble
getting them to run.
Any pointers?
Thanks, Hari
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**Author:**  [@hariraj](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/hariraj)\
**Post date:** [June 5, 2006, 11:36am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-parsing-libraries/95526/2 "2006-06-05T11:36:35Z")
My experience with Ruby’s html parsing tools are that they are
generally badly documented and buggy. I have had more success piping
the html I need parsed to a Perl program that uses Perl’s much, much
better html libraries and then reading back the output into my Ruby
program.
It’s ugly, but it works.
Check out [search.cpan.org](http://search.cpan.org) to see what perl classes are available.
-Scott
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**Author:**  [@hariraj](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/hariraj)\
**Post date:** [June 5, 2006, 11:39am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-parsing-libraries/95526/3 "2006-06-05T11:39:46Z")
I used html-tools:
[http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-htmltools/](http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-htmltools/)
and found it pretty simple to use but powerfull html parser library.
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**Author:**  [@hariraj](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/hariraj)\
**Post date:** [June 5, 2006, 12:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-parsing-libraries/95526/4 "2006-06-05T12:13:28Z")
* * *
Rails mailing list
removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid
[http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails](http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails)
---
**Author:**  [@hariraj](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/hariraj)\
**Post date:** [June 5, 2006, 11:42am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-parsing-libraries/95526/5 "2006-06-05T11:42:35Z")
Igor A. wrote:
> I used html-tools:
> [http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-htmltools/](http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-htmltools/)
> and found it pretty simple to use but powerfull html parser library.
Thanks Scott for your reply. I am looking for a simple ruby solution as
the page I am trying to parse has only few tables in it.
Igor, I tried to get the html-tools to run but couldn’t succeed ☹ I
tried to run the ebaysearch.rb demo program and couldn’t run it either.
I am using Ruby 1.8 with RoR 1.1.
Where you able to use the html-tools? Can you share a simple/sample
code?
Thanks, Hari
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**Author:**  [@hariraj](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/hariraj)\
**Post date:** [June 5, 2006, 7:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-parsing-libraries/95526/6 "2006-06-05T19:00:25Z")
BeautifulSoup has been ported to ruby as RubyfulSoup.
[Rubyful Soup: "The brush has got entangled in it!"](http://www.crummy.com/software/RubyfulSoup/)
it really works wonders when one must screen-scrape.
cheers,
jean-pierre
---
**Author:**  [@hariraj](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/hariraj)\
**Post date:** [June 5, 2006, 3:25pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-parsing-libraries/95526/7 "2006-06-05T15:25:27Z")
Igor A. wrote:
> * * *
>
> Rails mailing list
> removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid
> [http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails](http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails)
Hi Igor,
Have you quoted/attached something? I don’t see it.
Thanks, Hari