Ruby Nokogiri Parsing HTML table II

Question

Hi all

I have just installed ruby+mechanize. It seems to me that it is posible in ruby nokogiri what I want to do but I do not know how to do it.

What about this table? It is just part of html of vBulletin forum site. I tried to keep the html structure but deleted some text and tag attributes. I want to get some details per thread like: Title,Author,Date,Time,Replies,Views

Please note that there are few tables in the html document? I am after one particular table with its tbody <tbody id="threadbits_forum_251">. The name will be always the same (I hope) Can I use the tbody and the name in the code?

Thank you

R

<table >
    <tbody>
        <tr>    <!-- table header --> </tr>
    </tbody>
    <!-- show threads -->
    <tbody id="threadbits_forum_251">
        <tr>
            <td></td>
            <td></td>
            <td>
                <div>
                    <a href="showthread.php?t=230708" >Vb4 Gold Released</a>
                </div>
                <div>
                    <span><a>Paul M</a></span>
                </div>
            </td>
            <td>
                    06 Jan 2010 <span class="time">23:35</span><br />
                    by <a href="member.php?find=lastposter&amp;t=230708">shane943</a> 
                </div>
            </td>
            <td><a href="#">24</a></td>
            <td>1,320</td>
        </tr>

    </tbody>
</table>

Answer 1

#!/usr/bin/ruby1.8

require 'nokogiri'
require 'pp'

html = <<-EOS
  (The HTML from the question goes here)
EOS

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(html)
rows = doc.xpath('//table/tbody[@id="threadbits_forum_251"]/tr')
details = rows.collect do |row|
  detail = {}
  [
    [:title, 'td[3]/div[1]/a/text()'],
    [:name, 'td[3]/div[2]/span/a/text()'],
    [:date, 'td[4]/text()'],
    [:time, 'td[4]/span/text()'],
    [:number, 'td[5]/a/text()'],
    [:views, 'td[6]/text()'],
  ].collect do |name, xpath|
    detail[name] = row.at_xpath(xpath).to_s.strip
  end
  detail
end
pp details

# => [{:time=>"23:35",
# =>   :title=>"Vb4 Gold Released",
# =>   :number=>"24",
# =>   :date=>"06 Jan 2010",
# =>   :views=>"1,320",
# =>   :name=>"Paul M"}]