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**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [November 7, 2008, 10:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/parsing-html-using-regexes-and-arrays/152834 "2008-11-07T22:10:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1
**Author:**  [@soldier.coder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/soldier.coder)\
**Post date:** [November 7, 2008, 10:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/parsing-html-using-regexes-and-arrays/152834/1 "2008-11-07T22:10:56Z")
I have a nice little regex to pull the information rich guts from a
table…
%r{\(._?)}m =~html
# $1 now contains all the rows of the table as one long string.
I’d like to turn that into an array of rows, but I am not exactly sure
how.
Additionally, I’d like to process the rows so that i can get data from
between the nth
pair.
Any help?
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**Author:**  [@soldier.coder](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/soldier.coder)\
**Post date:** [November 7, 2008, 11:36pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/parsing-html-using-regexes-and-arrays/152834/2 "2008-11-07T23:36:02Z")
On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 3:08 PM, soldier.coder
[removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:
> between the nth pair.
>
> Any help?
If you have a string with a repeating pattern that you want an array
of, String#scan is your man.
irb(main):001:0\> html = “foobar”
=\> “foobar”
irb(main):002:0\> a = html.scan(/(.+?)\/)
=\> [[“foo”], [“bar”]]
Hmmm, that’s sort of ugly.
irb(main):003:0\> a = html.scan(/(.+?)\/).flatten
=\> [“foo”, “bar”]
Much better.
Ad hoc regexes are fine for quick-n-dirty scripting. But if you’re
serious about parsing HTML you might want to look into Hpricot or
Nokogiri.
-Michael L.