From: Michael Libby <michael.c.libby@...>
Date: 2008-11-08T07:33:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Parsing HTML using regexes and arrays.

On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 3:08 PM, soldier.coder
<geekprogrammer.ed@googlemail.com> wrote:
> I have a nice little regex to pull the information rich guts from a
> table....
>
> %r{</thead.*?>(.*?)</table>}m =~html
>  # $1 now contains all the rows of the table as one long string.
>
> I'd like to turn that into an array of rows, but I am not exactly sure
> how.
>
> Additionally, I'd like to process the rows so that i can get data from
> between the nth <td></td> pair.
>
> Any help?

If you have a string with a repeating pattern that you want an array
of, String#scan is your man.

irb(main):001:0> html = "<td>foo</td><td>bar</td>"
=> "<td>foo</td><td>bar</td>"
irb(main):002:0> a = html.scan(/<td>(.+?)<\/td>/)
=> [["foo"], ["bar"]]

Hmmm, that's sort of ugly.

irb(main):003:0> a = html.scan(/<td>(.+?)<\/td>/).flatten
=> ["foo", "bar"]

Much better.

Ad hoc regexes are fine for quick-n-dirty scripting. But if you're
serious about parsing HTML you might want to look into Hpricot or
Nokogiri.

-Michael Libby