Find the character index of a node within its parent node with Hpricot

Question

Suppose I have the following HTML:

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

I want to parse this with Hpricot:

doc = Hpricot(html)

Find the <b> node:

node = doc.at('b')

and then get the character index of the <b> node within its parent:

node.character_index
=> 22

How can I do this (i.e., what's the real version of the character_index() function I just made up)?

Answer 1

I don't think Hpricot works like that. Here is what I get doing a "node.inspect" based on your example

node.inspect
"{elem <b> \"years\" </b>}"

So, the position in the overall text that you are asking for just isn't there.

However, there are limited number of things you'd probably like to use the index for and you may be able to do these through the standard Hpricot methods