How can I use Ruby's Sanitize/Nokogiri to access untagged elements?

Question

Hi all,

I'm trying to build a Sanitize transformer that accepts potentially malformed HTML input with elements outside of any tags at all, such as in this example:

out of a tag<p>in a tag</p>out again!

I want to have the transformer wrap any non-tagged elements in <p> tags so that the above transforms into:

<p>out of a tag</p><p>in a tag</p><p>out again!</p>

Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to select the untagged element because it's not a node. I'm sure I'm missing something here. Can someone give me a nudge in the right direction?

Answer 1

require 'nokogiri'

html = 'out of a tag<p>in a tag</p>out again!'

Nokogiri::HTML(html).at_css('body').children.
  map {|x| '<p>' + x.text + '</p>' }.join('')
#=> "<p>out of a tag</p><p>in a tag</p><p>out again!</p>"

Text is stored in text nodes. Because CSS cannot select text nodes, you will have to use other methods to get them like Nokogiri::XML::Node#children.