Removing <p> elements with no text with Nokogiri - ruby

Question

Given an HTML document in Nokogiri, I want to remove all <p> nodes with no actual text. This includes <p> elements with whitespace and/or <br/> tags. What's the most elegant way to do this?

Answer 1

This is a simpler fix: it removes both the whitespace and the br tags.
given the HTML
"<p> </p><p>Foo<p/><p><br/> <br> </p>"
Solution:
document.css('p').find_all.each do |p|
# Ruby on Rails Solution:
p.remove if p.content.blank?
# Ruby solution, as pointed out by Michael Hartl:
p.remove if p.content.strip.empty?
end
# document => <p>Foo</p>

Answer 2

I would start with a method like this one (feel free to monkeypatch Nokogiri::XML::Node if you want to)
def is_blank?(node)
(node.text? && node.content.strip == '') || (node.element? && node.name == 'br')
end
Then continue with another method that checks that all children are blank:
def all_children_are_blank?(node)
node.children.all?{|child| is_blank?(child) }
# Here you see the convenience of monkeypatching... sometimes.
end
And finally, get the document and
document.css('p').find_all{|p| all_children_are_blank?(p) }.each do |p|
p.remove
end

Answer 3

There's a more elegant way:
require "nokogiri"
doc = Nokogiri::HTML.parse <<-EOHTML
<div>
<p class="empty_p"></p>
<p class="full_p">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
</p>
</div>
EOHTML
# Magic happens here...
doc.at_css("p:first-child:empty").remove
puts doc.to_html