From: Don Norcott <dnorcott@...>
Date: 2010-10-20T10:40:41+09:00
Subject: Help missing something BASIC

This code is conceptually what I want to do with the nokogiri code below
s1 = [1,2,3] ; s2 = [4,5,6]; s3 = [7,8,9]
str = [s1,s2,s3]
str.each do |itm|
  puts "********"
  puts " #{itm[2]}" Select middle item from each s1 , s2 ,s3
  puts "*********"
end
Results as expected
********
 3
*********
********
 6
*********
********
 9
*********

I have an html page with multiple <table>...</table> elements
(equivalent to str above) and want to process each table (equivalent to
s1, s2, s3) and extract one item <td[ class="itemNumbr ...> from the
table (equivalent to extracting the middle element in any  of s1 s2 s3).

I initially thought this was straight forward - but I am missing
something very fundamental when I move the concept to Nokogiri objects
---------------------- NOKOGIRI CODE ----------------------
require 'open-uri'
require 'nokogiri'

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open("c:/RUBY_OUT.TXT"));   # file containing web
page
doc.xpath("//table[@class='result']").each do |node|   # select a table
  puts "*************"
  puts node.to_html        # as expected
   puts node.xpath("//td[@class='itemNumbr']")  # 15 per each
  puts "*************"
end
---------------------- NOKOGIRI CODE ----------------------

The output below dispays the table HTML as expected - but not itemnumbrs
***********
<table ..................../table> for item 1
<td class ="itemNumbr.....<b1> 1.</b>...../td>
<td class ="itemNumbr.....<b1> 2.</b>...../td>
......
<td class ="itemNumbr.....<b1> 15.</b>...../td>
**********
**********
<table ..................../table> for item 2
<td class ="itemNumbr.....<b1> 1.</b>...../td>
<td class ="itemNumbr.....<b1> 2.</b>...../td>
......
<td class ="itemNumbr.....<b1> 15.</b>...../td>
**********
**********
<table ..................../table> for item 3
<td class ="itemNumbr.....<b1> 1.</b>...../td>
.......

The tables are outputted as expected Tables with itemnumbr 1 to 15
sequentially.
The node.xpath("//td[@class='itemNumbr']") acts as if node contains all
15 tables but the output indicates otherwise.  I think node should
always contain HTML for a single table only, but I appear to be wrong.

Also if i put a subscript on the first xpath
doc.xpath("//table[@class='result'][5]").each do |node|
to ensure only one table is found, still get itemnumbrs for all 15 table
elements

WHAT AM I MISSING HERE

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.