From: Peter Szinek <peter@...>
Date: 2007-06-15T15:13:21+09:00
Subject: Re: str.scan

Colin,

But my regexp
> is rusty and I'm not sure how I would set it up
>   items = page.scan('<li>*</li>')
> something like that? Then items would be an array of the text in the items?

Yes, they will be.

However, first things first:

1) items = page.scan('<li>*</li>')

I believe you want instead is

items = page.scan('<li>.*</li>')

( or maybe items = page.scan('<li>.+</li>') if you are not interested in 
empty <li>s)

2) What I really believe you want is

items = page.scan('<li>.*?</li>')

? adds greediness to your regexp - so instead of matching the first 
<li>. then matching as much as possible of anything, then matching the 
*last* </li>, 2) will match as less as possible.

Let's try:

stuff = <<HTML
<li>aaa</li>
<li>bbb</li>
HTML

 >> stuff.scan(/<li>.*?<\/li>/)
=> ["<li>aaa</li>", "<li>bbb</li>"]

3) Maybe you want even this:

 >> stuff.scan(/<li>(.*?)<\/li>/)
=> [["aaa"], ["bbb"]]

or, even more friendly:

 >> stuff.scan(/<li>(.*?)<\/li>/).flatten
=> ["aaa", "bbb"]

HTH,
Peter
_
http://www.rubyrailways.com :: Ruby and Web2.0 blog
http://scrubyt.org :: Ruby web scraping framework
http://rubykitchensink.ca/ :: The indexed archive of all things Ruby.