using HPricot to parse a fiddly table

[Adam Dullenty]

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:

<table>
<tr>
<td>...stuff I don't want...</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<table>
------------rows i want
<tr>
<td>
<table>
<tr>
<td>Field 1</td>
<td>Field 2</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
<td>Field 3</td>
<td>Field 4, Field 5</td>
</tr>
------------end of rows i want
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

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
Adam

 

[s.ross]

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?

 

[Adam Dullenty]

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
Adam