From: Mark Thomas <mrt@...>
Date: 2005-07-07T21:30:46+09:00
Subject: Ruby XPath support (was Re: Extract/Parse String?)

> Although that'll work for this particular string, I'd rather think this is a
> case for a HTML parser.  Apparently the name of a frame is wanted and a HTML
> parser is the safest way to get that info.

Agree completely. Regular expressions should not be used to parse HTML
or XML. However, XPath is an excellent alternative to regular
expressions in these cases. In XPath, the expression to get the name of
the frame would be '//frame/@name'.

Since I'm new to Ruby, I have to ask: is there an HTML parser that
supports XPath? I know that LibXML does a great job parsing HTML and I
find XPath to be a terrific way to do it--just about anything you want
to extract becomes a one-liner. Do the Ruby bindings expose this
functionality? If not, is there another library that can do this?

- Mark.