How to loop through an table and turn rows into objects using nokogiri

Question

I want to use nokogiri to loop through a html and create an object corresponding to every row. I am able to define the root xpaths where I want the data to fill the object varibles comes from but I dont know how to group these as an object.

My code is below. I know it doesn't work but I dont know what direction to go to make it work.

require 'rubygems' require 'nokogiri'

doc = Nokogiri::HTML.parse(<<-HTML_END) " LV1LV2LV3 MV1MV2MV3 NV1NV2NV3 " HTML_END

class Post def initialize(v1, v2, v3 ) @v1 =v1 @v2 = v2 @v3 = v3 end

  def v1= (v1)
    @v1 =v1
  end

  def v2
    @v2 =v2
  end

  def v3
    @v3 =v3
  end

end

class PostList def initialize @posts = Array.new end

    def append(aPost)
      @posts.push(aPost)
      self
    end

    def deleteFirst
      @posts.shift
    end

    def deleteLast
      @posts.pop
    end

end

list = PostList.new

parent = doc.css('body').first

gets the contects of the row

parent.xpath("//div/table[@class='ipbtable']/tr" ).each do |a_tag|

k1 = "x" k2 = "x" k3 = "x"

a_tag.xpath("td[1]").each do |x_tag|

puts x_tag.content

end

list.append(Post.new(k1, k2, k3) )

end

Answer 1

The main problem with the code appears to be you're passing strings ('K1', 'K2', 'K3') that vaguely resemble the names of variables rather than the variables themselves (k1, k2, k3). However, you could express this more succinctly as:

doc.search('table > tr').each do |row|
  properties = row.search('td/text()').collect {|text| text.to_s}
  list.append Post.new(*properties)
end

This simply loops over each row and creates a Post using the textual content of each td in the row.