From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2010-10-21T16:55:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Help missing something BASIC

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 12:18 AM, Don Norcott <dnorcott@mts.net> wrote:
> My issue is not with anything you have shown me and not with my ability
> to get the code working or get the next piece code working predictably.
>
> My only issue is conceptual.  I have no problem understanding that node
> contains the entire tree structure since I am able to return all the
> itemNumbr elements with
>    node.xpath("//td[@class='itemNumbr']")
>
>
> What I am not able to do is output proof to convince myself that the
> node contains other than the selected table (ie inspect, parse, to_s,
> to_html all return the single table).

The problem might lie in the term "contains".  Conceptually one would
probably say that a node contains all its sub nodes.  Technically a
node can also (indirectly) contain the whole document.  This happens
if you include a reference to the parent node or the document.  Here's
an example with parent node inclusion.

http://gist.github.com/638085

If you add a line "pp ch" to the iteration code at the end of the
file, you will see that each node "contains" all the rest of the
document.

> This is my last post - I really have no issue other than the conceptual

Hopefully not. :-)

> Thanks again for all your help.

Your welcome!

Kind regards

robert

-- 
remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end
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