Using HPricot to parse a fiddly table

Ruby
1

Hi there,

I’m fairly new to Ruby, previously I was an average programmer in Java,
so it’s all a bit foreign to me - especially XPath and cSS. I would be
grateful if someone could give me a hand with a problem I’m having. I
have a table which I’m trying to get the fields from in a certain way.
The table is in the form:

...stuff I don't want...
------------rows i want ------------end of rows i want
Field 1 Field 2
Field 3 Field 4, Field 5

I have managed to get HPricot to parse the page and return that HTML for
the table, however I’m struggling to get it into an array in the form
[“Field 1”, “Field 2”, “Field 3”, “Field 4”, “Field 5”] for each row. I
would have hoped there would be some kind of built in method for
extracting data from a table, but I can’t find one.

Thanks again, look forward to a reply :slight_smile:
Adam

2

For the innermost table, try:

eles = doc.search(‘table table table td’)

for the enclosing table,

eles = doc.search(‘table table td’)

I don’t suppose the semantics can be improved any – like class names
or ids?

3

Steve R. wrote:

I don’t suppose the semantics can be improved any – like class names
or ids?

Thanks for your reply. Afraid not, no handy names or ids. The code you
posted I think I was doing anyway in a slightly different form as
“elements2 = (elements/“table//table//td”)”. Since I posted last though
I’ve managed to sort it out just by lots of array manipulation.

Thanks for the help though :slight_smile:
Adam