From: Robert Klemme <bob.news@...>
Date: 2005-07-07T22:25:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby XPath support (was Re: Extract/Parse String?)

Mark Thomas wrote:
>> 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?

Rexml can - but then again, it's "just" an XML parser.

Kind regards

    robert