I'm trying to sanitize some HTML and just remove a single tag (and I'd really like to avoid using nokogiri, etc). So I've got the following string appearing I want to get rid of:
<div class="the_class>Some junk here that's different every time</div>
This appears exactly once in my string, and I'd like to find a way to remove it. I've tried coming up with a regex to capture it all but I can't find one that works.
I've tried /<div class="the_class">(.*)<\/div>/m and that works, but it'll also match up to and including any further </div> tags in the document, which I don't want.
Any ideas on how to approach this?
I believe you're looking for an non-greedy regex, like this:
/<div class="the_class">(.*?)<\/div>/m
Note the added ?. Now, the capturing group will capture as little as possible (non-greedy), instead of as most as possible (greedy).
Because it adds another dependency and slows my work down. Makes things more complicated. Plus, this solution is applicable to more than just HTML tags. My start and end strings can be anything.
I used to think the same way until I got a job writing spiders and web-site analytics, then writing a big RSS-aggregation system -- A parser was the only way out of that madness. Without it the work would never have been finished.
Yes, regex are good and useful, but there are dragons waiting for you. For instance, this common string will cause problems:
'<div class="the_class"><div class="inner_div">foo</div></div>'
The regex /<div class="the_class">(.*?)<\/div>/m will return:
"<div class=\"the_class\"><div class=\"inner_div\">foo</div>"
This malformed, but renderable HTML:
<div class="the_class"><div class="inner_div">foo
is even worse:
'<div class="the_class"><div class="inner_div">foo'[/<div class="the_class">(.*?)<\/div>/m]
=> nil
Whereas, a parser can deal with both:
require 'nokogiri'
[
'<div class="the_class"><div class="inner_div">foo</div></div>',
'<div class="the_class"><div class="inner_div">foo'
].each do |html|
doc = Nokogiri.HTML(html)
puts doc.at('div.the_class').text
end
Outputs:
foo
foo
Yes, your start and end strings could be anything, but there are well-recognized tools for parsing HTML/XML, and as your task grows the weaknesses in using regex will become more apparent.
And, yes, it's possible to have a parser fail. I've had to process RSS feeds that were so badly malformed the parser blew up, but a bit of pre-processing fixed the problem.
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RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags
I tested my regex in rubular.com and it works, but when I run the code it behaves differently.
I want to parse whole paragraphs out of some HTML code
Here is my regex
description = ad_page.body.scan(/(?<=<span id="preview-local-desc">).+(?=<\/span>)/m)
Here is some of the HTML source
<span id="preview-local-desc"> I want to pick up everything typed here.
Paragraphs, everything.
</span>
The match begins where I need it to but then it keeps matching all the way to the end of the document.
Aside from the fact that you shouldn't parse HTML with regex, you want non-greedy matching:
/(?<=<span id="preview-local-desc">).+?(?=<\/span>)/m
Parsing XML or HTML with a regex is marginally OK for trivial tasks, if you own or control the file's format. If you don't, then a simple change to the file could break your regex.
Using a parser will avoid that problem; I've parsed some horrible XML with Nokogiri and it didn't even notice. After writing a RSS aggregator that was handling 1000+ feeds I was hooked on using a parser.
require 'nokogiri'
html = '<span id="preview-local-desc"> I want to pick up everything typed here.
Paragraphs, everything.
</span>'
doc = Nokogiri.HTML(html)
doc.at('span').text
# => " I want to pick up everything typed here.\n Paragraphs, everything.\n "
If there are multiple <span> tags you want:
doc.search('span').map(&:text)
# => [" I want to pick up everything typed here.\n Paragraphs, everything.\n "]
If there are multiple <span> tags and you only want this one:
doc.at('span#preview-local-desc').text
# => " I want to pick up everything typed here.\n Paragraphs, everything.\n "
When I do
puts /<title>(.*?)<\/title>/.match(html)
I get
<h2>foobar</h2>
But I want just
foobar
What's the most elegant method for doing so?
The most elegant way would be to parse HTML with an HTML parser:
require 'nokogiri'
html = '<title><h2>Pancakes</h2></title>'
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(html)
title = doc.at('title').text
# title is now 'Pancakes'
If you try to do this with a regular expression, you will probably fail. For example, if you have an <h2> in your <title> what's to prevent you from having something like this:
<title><strong>Where</strong> is <span>pancakes</span> <em>house?</em></title>
Trying to handle something like that with a single regex is going to be ugly but doc.at('title').text handles that as easily as it handles <title>Pancakes</title> or <title><h2>Pancakes</h2></title>.
Regular expressions are great tools but they shouldn't be the only tool in your toolbox.
Something of this style will return just the contents of the match.
html[/<title>(.*?)<\/title>/,1]
Maybe you need to tell us more, like what html might contain, but right now, you are capturing the contents of the title block, irrespective of the internal tags. I think that is the way you should do it, rather than assuming that there is an internal tag you want to handle, especially because what would happen if you had two internal tags? This is why everyone is telling you to use an html parser, which you really should do.
I'm trying to retrieve every external link of a webpage using Ruby. I'm using String.scan with this regex:
/href="https?:[^"]*|href='https?:[^']*/i
Then, I can use gsub to remove the href part:
str.gsub(/href=['"]/)
This works fine, but I'm not sure if it's efficient in terms of performance. Is this OK to use or I should work with a more specific parser (nokogiri, for example)? Which way is better?
Thanks!
Using regular expressions is fine for a quick and dirty script, but Nokogiri is very simple to use:
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'
fail("Usage: extract_links URL [URL ...]") if ARGV.empty?
ARGV.each do |url|
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open(url))
hrefs = doc.css("a").map do |link|
if (href = link.attr("href")) && !href.empty?
URI::join(url, href)
end
end.compact.uniq
STDOUT.puts(hrefs.join("\n"))
end
If you want just the method, refactor it a little bit to your needs:
def get_links(url)
Nokogiri::HTML(open(url).read).css("a").map do |link|
if (href = link.attr("href")) && href.match(/^https?:/)
href
end
end.compact
end
I'm a big fan of Nokogiri, but why reinvent the wheel?
Ruby's URI module already has the extract method to do this:
URI::extract(str[, schemes][,&blk])
From the docs:
Extracts URIs from a string. If block given, iterates through all matched URIs. Returns nil if block given or array with matches.
require "uri"
URI.extract("text here http://foo.example.org/bla and here mailto:test#example.com and here also.")
# => ["http://foo.example.com/bla", "mailto:test#example.com"]
You could use Nokogiri to walk the DOM and pull all the tags that have URLs, or have it retrieve just the text and pass it to URI.extract, or just let URI.extract do it all.
And, why use a parser, such as Nokogiri, instead of regex patterns? Because HTML, and XML, can be formatted in a lot of different ways and still render correctly on the page or effectively transfer the data. Browsers are very forgiving when it comes to accepting bad markup. Regex patterns, on the other hand, work in very limited ranges of "acceptability", where that range is defined by how well you anticipate the variations in the markup, or, conversely, how well you anticipate the ways your pattern can go wrong when presented with unexpected patterns.
A parser doesn't work like a regex. It builds an internal representation of the document and then walks through that. It doesn't care how the file/markup is laid out, it does its work on the internal representation of the DOM. Nokogiri relaxes its parsing to handle HTML, because HTML is notorious for being poorly written. That helps us because with most non-validating HTML Nokogiri can fix it up. Occasionally I'll encounter something that is SO badly written that Nokogiri can't fix it correctly, so I'll have to give it a minor nudge by tweaking the HTML before I pass it to Nokogiri; I'll still use the parser though, rather than try to use patterns.
Mechanize uses Nokogiri under the hood but has built-in niceties for parsing HTML, including links:
require 'mechanize'
agent = Mechanize.new
page = agent.get('http://example.com/')
page.links_with(:href => /^https?/).each do |link|
puts link.href
end
Using a parser is generally always better than using regular expressions for parsing HTML. This is an often-asked question here on Stack Overflow, with this being the most famous answer. Why is this the case? Because constructing a robust regular expression that can handle real-world variations of HTML, some valid some not, is very difficult and ultimately more complicated than a simple parsing solution that will work for just about all pages that will render in a browser.
why you dont use groups in your pattern?
e.g.
/http[s]?:\/\/(.+)/i
so the first group will already be the link you searched for.
Can you put groups in your regex? That would reduce your regular expressions to 1 instead of 2.
I have a very large xml file which I load as a string
so my XML lools like
<publication ID="7728" contentstatus="Unchanged" idID="0b000064800e9e39">
<volume contentstatus="Unchanged" idID="0b0000648151c35d">
<article ID="5756261" contentstatus="Changed" doi="10.1109/TNB.2011.2145270" idID="0b0000648151d8ca"/>
</volume>
I want to count the number of occurrences the string
article ID="5705641" contentstatus="Changed"
how can I convert the ID to a regex
Here is what I have tried doing
searchstr = 'article ID=\"/[1-9]{7}/\" contentstatus=\"Changed\"'
count = ((xml.scan(searchstr).length)).to_s
puts count
Please let me know how can I achieve this?
Thanks
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you're new to Ruby. First, it's not necessary to convert count into a string to puts it. Puts automatically calls to_s on anything you send to it.
Second, it's rarely a good idea to handle XML with string manipulation. I would strongly advise that you use a full fledged XML parser such as Nokogiri.
That said, you can't embed a regex in a string like that. The entire query string would need to be a regex.
Something like
/article ID="[1-9]{7}" contentstatus="Changed"/
Quotation marks aren't special characters in a regex, so you don't need to escape them.
When in doubt about regex in Ruby, I recommend checking out Rubular.com.
And once again, I can't emphasize enough that I really don't condone trying to manipulate XML via regex. Nokogiri will make dealing with XML a billion times easier and more reliable.
If XPath is an option, it is a preferred way of selecting XML elements. You can use the selector:
//article[#contentstatus="Changed"]
Or, if possible:
count(//article[#contentstatus="Changed"])
Nokogiri is my recommended Ruby XML parser. It's very robust, and is probably the standard for the language now.
I added two more "articles" to show how easily you can find and manipulate the contents, without having to rely on a regex.
require 'nokogiri'
xml =<<EOT
<publication ID="7728" contentstatus="Unchanged" idID="0b000064800e9e39">
<volume contentstatus="Unchanged" idID="0b0000648151c35d">
<article ID="5756261" contentstatus="Changed" doi="10.1109/TNB.2011.2145270" idID="0b0000648151d8ca"/>
<article ID="5756262" contentstatus="Unchanged" doi="10.1109/TNB.2011.2145270" idID="0b0000648151d8ca"/>
<article ID="5756263" contentstatus="Changed" doi="10.1109/TNB.2011.2145270" idID="0b0000648151d8ca"/>
</volume>
EOT
doc = Nokogiri::XML(xml)
puts doc.search('//article[#contentstatus="Changed"]').size.to_s + ' found'
puts doc.search('//article[#contentstatus="Changed"]').map{ |n| "#{ n['ID'] } #{ n['doi'] } #{ n['idID'] }" }
>> 2 found
>> 5756261 10.1109/TNB.2011.2145270 0b0000648151d8ca
>> 5756263 10.1109/TNB.2011.2145270 0b0000648151d8ca
The problem with using regex with HTML or XML, is they'll break really easily if the XML changes, or if your XML comes from different sources or is malformed. Regex was never designed to handle that sort of problem, but a parser was. You could have XML with line ends after every tag, or none at all, and the parser won't really care as long as the XML is well-formed. A good parser, like Nokogiri can even do fixups if the XML is broken, in order to try to make sense of it, but
Your current string looks almost perfect to me, just remove the errant / from around the numbers:
searchstr = 'article ID=\"[1-9]{7}\" contentstatus=\"Changed\"'
I have a tag that contains a dot (.) that I want haml to preserve:
Haml:
%text
%text.resource
...
I would like Haml to expand to:
<text>
<text.resource>...
</text.resource>
<text>
but it keeps doing:
<text>
<text class="resource">...
<text>
<text>
Is there any easy way to "escape" "class" expansion in Haml?
HAML is made to generate HTML of various forms, but you can trick it to generate other things by being creative. Putting in what you want to get back out:
<text>
<text.resource>...
</text.resource>
<text>
will work, because if HAML sees a line that doesn't start with one of its reserved characters it'll output it as is. You can't indent though, or it will get mad.
From the docs:
Note that HTML tags are passed through unmodified as well. If you have some HTML you don’t want to convert to Haml, or you’re converting a file line-by-line, you can just include it as-is. For example:
%p
<div id="blah">Blah!</div>
is compiled to:
<p>
<div id="blah">Blah!</div>
</p>
You could do:
<text>
= " <text.resource>..."
= " </text.resource>"
<text>
if you insist on indentation:
>> <text>
>> <text.resource>...
>> </text.resource>
>> <text>
EDIT:
The OP says:
the problem I have is that the elypsis (...) means that I have to add more haml code there (a bunch of xml tags that would be "children" of and therefore I need to "indent" the lines after the comments...
XML doesn't care about indentation; Indentation is a for-human-eyes-only aesthetic. I'd worry more about being functionally and syntactically correct. If you absolutely have to have "pretty" XML, then consider running the HAML output through xmllint, or tidy with the xml flags set.
Or, abandon HAML because you're starting to abuse it, and use something like ERB and/or Erubis which is more free form and less caring about syntax, or go old-school and generate the XML via print and puts statements. If you insist on using HAML and having your indentation, then I'd suggest consulting with the HAML developers and see if they have a recommendation. There might be a HAML filter that would be of use, or some other way of forcing the indentation level inline.
My advice, as someone who's been doing this a long time and been there too many times is: We, as software developers, can lose sight of the end-goal of being functional and spin off into some yak-shaving exercise worrying about minutia that don't accomplish anything real. Unless it's a specification that every indenting space is sacred I'd worry more about getting correct XML and move on, then later return to it and see if it can be tweaked to perfection.