Getting portion of href attribute using hpricot

Question

I think I need a combo of hpricot and regex here. I need to search for 'a' tags with an 'href' attribute that starts with 'abc/', and returns the text following that until the next forward slash '/'.

So, given:

<a href="/abc/12345/xyz123/">One</a>
<a href="/abc/67890/xyzabc/">Two</a>

I need to get back: '12345' and '67890'

Can anyone lend a hand? I've been struggling with this.

Answer 1

What about splitting the string by /?

(I don't know Hpricot, but according to the docs):

doc.search("a[@href]").each do |a|
    return a.somemethodtogettheattribute("href").split("/")[2]; // 2, because the string starts with '/'
end

Answer 2

or use regex:

s = '<a href="/abc/12345/xyz123/">One</a>'
s =~ /abc\/([^\/]*)/
return $1

Answer 3

You don't need regex but you can use it. Here's two examples, one with regex and the other without, using Nokogiri, which should be compatible with Hpricot for your use, and uses CSS accessors:

require 'nokogiri'

html = %q[
  <a href="/abc/12345/xyz123/">One</a>
  <a href="/abc/67890/xyzabc/">Two</a>
]

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(html)
doc.css('a[@href]').map{ |h| h['href'][/(\d+)/, 1] } # => ["12345", "67890"]
doc.css('a[@href]').map{ |h| h['href'].split('/')[2] } # => ["12345", "67890"]