From: Xavier Noria <fxn@...>
Date: 2006-07-09T05:04:25+09:00
Subject: Re: WAtir usage

On Jul 8, 2006, at 19:25, junkone@rogers.com wrote:

> Hi
> I found Watir and am excited to use it. I cannot find much examples in
> terms of data scraping. I have gotne to a point wherei can use it to
> submit form details.
> I need to scrape data from the tables etc. How do i do it.
> For eg my if ie is my browser object, how do i get the tables in the
> page and extract data from 3 table in the page into a array?

Watir is a wrapper around MSIE. In my limited experience crawling  
with Watir, besides reading its documentation I think it's good to  
study the underlying API, available here:

   http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/ 
browser/mshtml/reference/reference.asp

In particular the interfaces IWebBrowser2, IHTMLDocument2, and  
IHTMLDocument3:

   http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/browser/webbrowser/reference/ 
ifaces/iwebbrowser2/iwebbrowser2.asp
   http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/browser/mshtml/reference/ifaces/ 
document2/document2.asp
   http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/browser/mshtml/reference/ifaces/ 
document3/document3.asp

There you see what can be done grabbing the ie attribute of the  
Watir::IE object, in case the wrapping interface does not address  
some particular need. Additionally, I have found reading watir.rb  
very instructive, you have a better knowledge of what you are doing  
and may give context and idioms.

-- fxn