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**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [September 25, 2006, 2:22pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-x-html-parser/69906 "2006-09-25T14:22:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1
**Author:**  [@andreim](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andreim)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2006, 2:22pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-x-html-parser/69906/1 "2006-09-25T14:22:09Z")
Hi guys,
I’m starting to learn Ruby and I was thinking about a little app so I
can
get things started as quickly as possible. Since I’m an avid blog
reader,
the first thing that went though my mind was a small app that would
extract
the RSS or Atom feed from a web page, giving the URL.
My first choice were regexps but I’m thinking that my little app my grow
a
little bit more in the not-so-distant future and I might be doing more
than
just extracting feeds.
I found:
- ymHTML at [http://www.yoshidam.net/Ruby.html](http://www.yoshidam.net/Ruby.html)
- RAA at [http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/html-parser-2/](http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/html-parser-2/)
but they don’t look really standard and RAA doesn’t look like it’s
currently
maintained. I’ve also heard that there’s a Rails HTML parser but I
couldn’t
find more info (an pro’lly I’ll ask on one of the Rails list).
Is there a more “standard” way to parse HTML pages in Ruby?
Thanks,
Andrei
---
**Author:**  [@andreim](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andreim)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2006, 4:02pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-x-html-parser/69906/2 "2006-09-25T16:02:33Z")
There’s Hpricot. Haven’t used it myself though.
[http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/](http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/)
---
**Author:**  [@andreim](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andreim)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2006, 4:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-x-html-parser/69906/3 "2006-09-25T16:50:46Z")
Jordan E. wrote:
> There’s Hpricot. Haven’t used it myself though.
>
> [http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/](http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/)
Hpricot is _really_ nice. Also, there is the standard REXML (built-in
since 1.8). See the tutorial for some ideas how to use it:
[http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml/docs/tutorial.html](http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml/docs/tutorial.html)
Regards,
Jordan
---
**Author:**  [@andreim](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andreim)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2006, 5:14pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-x-html-parser/69906/4 "2006-09-25T17:14:52Z")
Andrei M. wrote:
> I found:
>
> - ymHTML at [http://www.yoshidam.net/Ruby.html](http://www.yoshidam.net/Ruby.html)
> - RAA at [http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/html-parser-2/](http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/html-parser-2/)
>
> but they don’t look really standard and RAA doesn’t look like it’s currently
> maintained. I’ve also heard that there’s a Rails HTML parser but I couldn’t
> find more info (an pro’lly I’ll ask on one of the Rails list).
>
> Is there a more “standard” way to parse HTML pages in Ruby?
> The closest you’ll find to a standard is REXML, which is an XML parser
> that ships in the stdlib. You’ll want to throw your HTML through Tidy
> first, though - but that’s an easy install.
There are a couple of alternatives: Hpricot and html-parser spring
instantly to mind.
If you’re doing feed parsing, you probably also want to check out
feedtools.
---
**Author:**  [@andreim](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andreim)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2006, 6:59pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-x-html-parser/69906/5 "2006-09-25T18:59:20Z")
On Mon, Sep 25, 2006 at 11:01:18PM +0900, Jordan E. wrote:
> There’s Hpricot. Haven’t used it myself though.
>
> [http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/](http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/)
If you decide to us Hpricot, I’d recommend the latest 0.4.52 gems:
gem install hpricot --source [code.whytheluckystiff.net](http://code.whytheluckystiff.net)
There’s been a good deal of patching over the past week and a new
release is
very close.
\_why
---
**Author:**  [@andreim](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andreim)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2006, 7:51pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-x-html-parser/69906/6 "2006-09-25T19:51:27Z")
> > Since I’m an avid blog reader,
> > the first thing that went though my mind was a small app that would extract
> > the RSS or Atom feed from a web page, giving the URL.
>
> If you’re doing feed parsing, you probably also want to check out feedtools.
Well… he probably won’t learn much from the FeedTools code, but it is
convenient for this sort of thing:
irb(main):001:0\> $KCODE = ‘u’
=\> “u”
irb(main):002:0\> require ‘feed\_tools’
=\> true
irb(main):003:0\> feed = FeedTools::Feed.open(‘[http://intertwingly.net/](http://intertwingly.net/)’)
=\> #\
irb(main):004:0\> feed.title
=\> “Sam Ruby”
irb(main):005:0\> feed.subtitle
=\> “It’s just data”
Cheers,
Bob A.