From: Tamara Temple <tamouse.lists@...>
Date: 2013-06-07T13:14:32+09:00
Subject: Re: feedzirra with xpath

Soichi Ishida <lists@ruby-forum.com> wrote:
> I have general questions about feedzirra.
> https://github.com/pauldix/feedzirra
> 
> in the documentation, it says,
> 
> "The final feature of Feedzirra is the ability to define custom parsing
> classes. In truth, Feedzirra could be used to parse much more than
> feeds. Microformats, page scraping, and almost anything else are fair
> game."
> 
> so it sounds like I can parse any web pages (assuming permissions are
> granted) .
> Does it mean I can scrape web pages with xpath as well?

You *could*, but from a cursory read, I'd say feedzirra is primarily
interested in handing feeds in a bulk in a very effecient manner.

That said, you can definitely use xpaths with nokogiri to scrape pages;
this is what the mechanize gem does, and what other web driver type gems
do. While feedzirra could probably be coerced into doing general
parsing, it's probably more work to do that than to simply use nokogiri
directly.