From: Derek Cannon <novellterminator@...>
Date: 2010-04-18T19:21:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Elegant Solution to a Seemingly Simple Problem?

> There are lots of ways to identify more precisely which part of the HTML
> you want, using CSS selectors. Most easily, if the rows are inside 
> <table id='courses'> then seomthing like 'table#courses tr' could do it.

Since my original post, I've been playing around with the code some 
more. I made a new way of getting courses that automatically filters out 
"non-course" rows. The code is:

table = doc.css("tr").collect { |row|
  row.css(".dddefault").collect { |column|
    column.text.strip
  }
}

This way, "non-courses" appear as empty arrays. I still don't know how 
to neatly get rid of the empty arrays... I tried .compact! but that 
doesn't seem to work.

>doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open(url))
>raw_course_list = doc.css("tr").collect { |row|
>  t_row = row.css("td").collect { |column| column.text.strip }
>  t_row.insert(2, "") if (t_row[1] == "TBA")
>}.reject{ |i| i.size != 4 }

Excellent example, I think this is much better than what I had earlier. 
I guess I could now replace your reject with i.empty?, right?

PS - I changed raw_course_list to table to make it more readable.
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