explain the code - custom class definition & use (ruby)

Question

could somebody explain the code below for me? Only the lines where is #??? I asked and got an answer It does 100% what I asked for. Now I need to add some code and I do not know where. I tried and it did not work. I used custom class in ruby twice so far otherwise I used to use arrays.

Is it actually custom class used below? :-)

I need to add code that clicks url of the thread and extracts some details from the post itself. I know how to do it but where can I add the code? I tried with error or wrong results.

I am scraping web forum and I need to go through few pages so I will call the same code on every single page. Is this code structure below ok in that terms?

#!/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 = {}                               #??? - is that definition of custom class
  [                                         #???
    [: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|                #??? - filling with data?
                                          #??? - where did we get name and xpath from?
    detail[name] = row.at_xpath(xpath).to_s.strip #??? here we fill all date,time etc attributes??
  end
  detail                          #??? this is really tricky for me. Why is it here?
end
pp details

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

Answer 1

No offense is intended by this, but you don't appear to have any knowledge of Ruby. Your comments indicate you have no knowledge of methods, Hashes, Arrays, blocks, or iterators. Please visit the the Ruby website and go through some of their tutorials and read the documentation.

I'd also like to suggest purchasing Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide for a great tutorial and reference.

detail = {}          #??? - is that definition of custom class

See Hash

[                                         #???
  [:title, 'td[3]/div[1]/a/text()'],      #???

See Array

].collect do |name, xpath| #??? - filling with data?
                           #??? - where did we get name and xpath from?

See Enumerable

detail   #??? this is really tricky for me. Why is it here?

See blocks and Enumerable#collect

Answering your question in any further depth is beyond the scope of StackOverflow.