From: Gene Tani <gene.tani@...>
Date: 2006-01-12T01:43:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Finding a sentence (more than one word & punctuation (, . ;)) in a string?


Kev Jackson wrote:
> given this string
>
> "    <td valign=\"top\">message</td>    <td valign=\"top\">the message
> to echo.</td>    <td valign=\"top\" align=\"center\">Yes, unless data is
> included in a character section within this element.</td>  </tr>  "
>
> how can I get this result
>
> ["message", "the message to echo.", "Yes, unless data is included in a
> character section within this element."]
>
> ?
>
> I've tried scan + regexp, but the best I've got so far is
>
> [["message"]]
>
> with this
>
> r.scan(/\">(\w+\s*)<\/td>/)
>
> Thanks
> Kev

if this is an HTML table extraction thing, rubyful soup is the easiest
way to do it
http://www.crummy.com/software/RubyfulSoup/documentation.html

there's also the htmltokenizer.getText() method, (which i just now
discovered by googling) which allows you to extract from before 1 tag
at a time
http://htmltokenizer.rubyforge.org/doc/
http://htmltokenizer.rubyforge.org/doc/