Ruby + Nokogiri + Xpath navigate Node_Set - ruby

Question

<Item id="item0">
<Links>
<FirstLink id="link1" target="one"/>
<SecondLink id="link2" target="two"/>
</Links>
<Data>
<String>content</String>
</Data>
</Item>
<Item id="item1">
<Links>
<FirstLink id="link1" target="two"/>
<SecondLink id="link2" target="two"/>
</Links>
<Data>
<String>content</String>
</Data>
</Item>
I have created a Nokogiri-NodeSet with this structure, i.e. a list of items with links and data children.
How can I filter any items that don't match a certain value in the 'target'-attribute of <FirstLink>?
Actually, what I want in the end is to extract the <Data><String>-Content of every <Item> that matches a certain value in it's <FirstLink> "Target"-Attribute.
I've tried several approaches already but I'm at a loss as to how to identify an element by an attribute of it's grandchild, then extracting the content of this grandchild's parent's sibling, X(.

Answer 1

We can build up an XPath expression to do this. Assuming we are starting from the whole XML document, rather than the node-set you already have, something like
//Item
will select all <Item> elements (I’m guessing you already have something like that to get this node-set).
Next, to select only those <Item> elements which have <Links><FirstLink> where FirstLink has a target attribute value of one:
//Item[Links/FirstLink[#target='one']]
and finally to select the Data/String children of those nodes:
//Item[Links/FirstLink[#target='one']]/Data/String
So with Nokogiri you could use something like this (where doc is your parsed document):
doc.xpath("//Item[Links/FirstLink[#target='one']]/Data/String")
or if you want to use the node-set you already have you can use a relative expression:
nodeset.xpath("self::Item[Links/FirstLink[#target='one']]/Data/String")

Answer 2

I completely didn't understand what your goal is. But using a guess, I am trying to show you, how to proceed in this case :
require 'nokogiri'
doc = Nokogiri::XML <<-xml
<Item id="item0">
<Links>
<FirstLink id="link1" target="one"/>
<SecondLink id="link2" target="two"/>
</Links>
<Data>
<String>content1</String>
</Data>
</Item>
<Item id="item1">
<Links>
<FirstLink id="link1" target="two"/>
<SecondLink id="link2" target="two"/>
</Links>
<Data>
<String>content2</String>
</Data>
</Item>
xml
#xpath method with the expression "//Item", will select all the Item nodes. Then those Item nodes will be passed to the #reject method to select only those nodes, that has a node called Links having the target attribute value is "one". If any of the links, either FirstLink or SecondLink has the target attribute value "one", for that nodes grandparent node Item will be selected.
node.at("//Links/FirstLink")['target'] will give you the string say "one" which is a value of target attribute of the node, FirstLink of first Item nodes , then "two" from the second Item node. The part ['any vaue'] in node.at("//Links/FirstLink")['target']['any vaue'] is a call to the String#[] method.
Remember below approach will give you the flexibility of the use regular expression too.
nodeset = doc.xpath("//Item").reject do |node|
node.at("//Links/FirstLink")['target']['any vaue']
end
Now nodeset contains only the required Item nodes. Now I use #map, passing each item node inside it to collect the content of the String node. Then #at method with an expression //Data/String, will select the String node. Then #text, will give you the content of each String node.
nodeset.map { |n| n.at('//Data/String').text } # => ["content1"]