How to insert a DOM node a a specific character index in an existing node (with Hpricot or a similar Ruby library)

Question

Suppose I have this HTML:

html = <div>Four score and seven years ago</div>

What's the best way to insert (say) an anchor tag after the word "score"? Note: I want to do this in terms of DOM manipulation (with Hpricot, e.g.) not in terms of text manipulation (e.g., no regexes)

Answer 1

i am not that fluent in ruby. but normally you should have: Element div - and TextNode "Four score and seven years ago"

now if you want to insert something you will have to:

• split the text from the text node into two (the original should change to "Four score") with text search/split functions
• create a Element
• create a new text-node with the rest of the text
• append the a-element to the div element and then append the newly created text node

Answer 2

require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'

doc = Nokogiri::XML(DATA)
text = doc.xpath('//text()').first
text.content =~ /^(.*score)(.*)$/
text.content = $1
node = Nokogiri::XML::Node.new('a',doc)
text.add_next_sibling node
node.add_next_sibling Nokogiri::XML::Text.new($2,doc)

puts doc.to_xml

__END__
<div>Four score and seven years ago</div>