From: Kenneth McDonald <kenneth.m.mcdonald@...>
Date: 2008-12-16T10:23:02+09:00
Subject: How to use ReXML "in the wild"?

I'd very much like to use ReXML's XPATH features to extract info from  
Google's financial info pages, but find that Rexml chokes on the  
Javascript, here's the result of trying to read in a page with this  
bit of code:

require "rexml/document"
require 'net/http'
Net::HTTP.start('finance.google.com') do |http|
   response = http.get('/finance?fstype=ii&q=NYSE:WAT')
   rdoc = REXML::Document.new(response.body)
end

==========
Output:

/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/rexml/parsers/treeparser.rb:92:in `parse':  
#<RuntimeError: Illegal character '&' in raw string  
" (REXML::ParseException)
(function(){
var d=navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("msie")!=-1;function  
e(){var b=document.styleSheets;for(var a=b.length-1;a>=0;--a){var  
c=b[a].href;if(c)if(c.indexOf("styles/finance_")!=-1|| 
c.indexOf("styles_")!=-1)return b[a]}return null}function f(){var  
b=e();if(b){var a=b.rules;return  
a.length>0&&a[a.length-1].selectorText==".lastFinanceRule"}return false}
function g(){if(document.scripts)for(var b=0;b">
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/rexml/text.rb:91:in `initialize'
.
.
.

Is there a good way to get around this problem? If, not, I guess it's  
back to regular expressions...

Thanks,
Ken