From: Kenneth McDonald <kenneth.m.mcdonald@...>
Date: 2007-08-26T08:45:47+09:00
Subject: How to best extract Ruby strings from REXML::Text instances?

REXML is a great package and is making it very easy for me to extract 
data from web pages. However, I'm having trouble with extracting a file 
string value from text nodes. My understanding from reading the API doc 
is that saying something like

    p a_textnode.value

should print out the string value of the textnode with special character 
entities back-substituted, eg. with " " put in place of "&nbsp;". 
However, I'm getting the XML-style value, i.e. I'm getting something like

    &nbsp;15.16&nbsp;

printed to the terminal, special character entities aren't being 
substituted for.


Am I misinterpreting what .value does? Is there a better or other way to 
do this?


Thanks,
Ken

P.S. Can anyone recommend a good XPath quick reference or summary?