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352

answers:

2

I have an html element like:

<div id="spam[500]">

I want to search for this element by id, but it seems that nokogiri is getting confused by the []. I'm trying:

doc.css("#spam[#{eggs.id}]")

but to no avail.

+4  A: 

Chris, try this and let me know if it works:

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(page)
el = doc.xpath("//div[@id='spam[500]']").first

The problem is that you can't access it via CSS (even in the browser). Try setting some CSS attributes for "spam[500]" and they won't be applied. You can access via xpath however, as shown above.

Mike Trpcic
It does work. Thanks.
Christopher Foy
A: 

The real problem here is that the characters [ and ] are illegal in an HTML4 (or XML) id attribute - look at the following:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-name

(for the normative definition of the id attribute look at www.w3.org//TR/html401/struct/global.html#adef-id)

Tim Diggins