From: Phlip <phlipcpp@...>
Date: 2007-07-15T14:30:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Double slash in Hpricot...?

Daniel Waite wrote:

> What's the purpose of the double slash in Hpricot?
>
> doc.search("/html/body//p")

Google for an XPath tutorial. // is XPathic for the "any descendant" axis. 
So the above matches any <p> (presumably the first) in the body of a 
document.

The equivalent in XPath would be assert_xpath('/html/body//p'). I don't know 
how close Hpricot comes to XPath, which can do things like this:

assert_xpath ".//Statement[ last() - 1 ]"


That matches the second-to-last item called <Statement>

However, REXML::XPath cannot handle common XHTML idioms...

Can't we all just ... get along?

-- 
  Phlip
  http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510657/
  "Test Driven Ajax (on Rails)"
  assert_xpath, assert_javascript, & assert_ajax