From: Mark Hubbart <discord@...>
Date: 2004-02-25T07:57:15+09:00
Subject: Re: HTML/XML Parsing...

"Ruby Tuesday" <rubytuzdayz@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:c1gidb$1j6abi$1@ID-205437.news.uni-berlin.de...
> I'm wondering if anyone ever come across an example on how to parse an 
> html
> table(with images) using either XSLT or Ruby scripts.
>
> I'd like to be able to extract all the data and put them in the
> database(MySQL, SQLite, etc).
>
> There's a twist though, some of the image cells has 2 or more jpeg 
> images
> instead of one. Since I'm not an expert database designer, how do you 
> do
> that?
>
> Table fields:
> ------------
> xnum    text(40)         unique
> image   jpeg image     (may have none, or 1+ images)
> desc     memo(256)
> loc       memo(256)
>
> Thanks.

It's been a while since I worked with databases, but perhaps something 
like this:

table 1: "cells"
- id     int       autoincrement primary_key
- xnum   text(40)	unique
- desc   ...
- loc    ...

table 2: "images"
- id      int  autoincrement primary_key
- cell_id int  index
- image   blob


that way, more than one image could be linked to the same cell_id. then:

SELECT image, xnum FROM images, cells WHERE cell_id = cells.id;

...to select a list of records conating to fields: image data, and cell 
numbers (assuming that's what the xnum is)

Alternatively, you could forgo the ids, and link images via xnums. But 
I understand that using ids is the "right" way, whatever that means. :)