From: Adam Dullenty <adam.dullenty@...>
Date: 2008-01-07T04:13:22+09:00
Subject: using HPricot to parse a fiddly table

Hi there,

I'm fairly new to Ruby, previously I was an average programmer in Java,
so it's all a bit foreign to me - especially XPath and cSS. I would be
grateful if someone could give me a hand with a problem I'm having. I
have a table which I'm trying to get the fields from in a certain way.
The table is in the form:

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>...stuff I don't want...</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>
       <table>
         ------------rows i want
         <tr>
           <td>
             <table>
               <tr>
                 <td>Field 1</td>
                 <td>Field 2</td>
               </tr>
             </table>
           </td>
           <td>Field 3</td>
           <td>Field 4, Field 5</td>
         </tr>
         ------------end of rows i want
       </table>
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

I have managed to get HPricot to parse the page and return that HTML for
the table, however I'm struggling to get it into an array in the form
["Field 1", "Field 2", "Field 3", "Field 4", "Field 5"] for each row. I
would have hoped there would be some kind of built in method for
extracting data from a table, but I can't find one.

Thanks again, look forward to a reply :)
Adam
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