>> ---- >> >> So what I want to do is count the number of li's in a particular div >> section. In this case the answer is 2. It might be more, it might be >> 0. >> >> I can find the section I want with a regex but I don't know how to >> iterate through the string looking for particular elements. I was >> thinking about taking the section I'm interested in and saving it as >> an array and then iterating through each array element (html line) >> that way, but I thought there might be a quicker way to do it. >> >> suggestions? > > I'd use Nokogiri. Off the top of my head, it would be something like (untested): > > require 'nokogiri' > > html_string=< #[your html] > END > > doc = Nokogiri::HTML(html_string) > puts doc.search("/div/ul/li").size > > Maybe you will need to adjust the xpath search, but I think it should > be something like that. I am now at my computer so I can test this. It seems that Nokogiri::HTML yields a complete HTML, adding and tags around the fragment, so this works: irb(main):002:0> require 'nokogiri' => true irb(main):003:0> html_string =< irb(main):005:0"

irb(main):006:0" Section Heading I'm interested in: irb(main):007:0"

irb(main):008:0"

irb(main):010:0"
irb(main):011:0" irb(main):012:0"
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irb(main):015:0"
irb(main):016:0" irb(main):017:0"
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irb(main):020:0"

>> Section Heading I'm interested in: >>

irb(main):006:0" Section Heading I'm interested in: irb(main):007:0"