How do I parse a plain HTML table with Nokogiri? - ruby

Question

I'd like to parse a HTML page with the Nokogiri. There is a table in part of the page which does not use any specific ID. Is it possible to extract something like:
Today,3,455,34
Today,1,1300,3664
Today,10,100000,3444,
Yesterday,3454,5656,3
Yesterday,3545,1000,10
Yesterday,3411,36223,15
From this HTML:
<div id="__DailyStat__">
<table>
<tr class="blh"><th colspan="3">Today</th><th class="r" colspan="3">Yesterday</th></tr>
<tr class="blh"><th>Qnty</th><th>Size</th><th>Length</th><th class="r">Length</th><th class="r">Size</th><th class="r">Qnty</th></tr>
<tr class="blr">
<td>3</td>
<td>455</td>
<td>34</td>
<td class="r">3454</td>
<td class="r">5656</td>
<td class="r">3</td>
</tr>
<tr class="bla">
<td>1</td>
<td>1300</td>
<td>3664</td>
<td class="r">3545</td>
<td class="r">1000</td>
<td class="r">10</td>
</tr>
<tr class="blr">
<td>10</td>
<td>100000</td>
<td>3444</td>
<td class="r">3411</td>
<td class="r">36223</td>
<td class="r">15</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>

Answer 1

As a quick and dirty first pass I'd do:
html = <<EOT
<div id="__DailyStat__">
<table>
<tr class="blh"><th colspan="3">Today</th><th class="r" colspan="3">Yesterday</th></tr>
<tr class="blh"><th>Qnty</th><th>Size</th><th>Length</th><th class="r">Length</th><th class="r">Size</th><th class="r">Qnty</th></tr>
<tr class="blr">
<td>3</td>
<td>455</td>
<td>34</td>
<td class="r">3454</td>
<td class="r">5656</td>
<td class="r">3</td>
</tr>
<tr class="bla">
<td>1</td>
<td>1300</td>
<td>3664</td>
<td class="r">3545</td>
<td class="r">1000</td>
<td class="r">10</td>
</tr>
<tr class="blr">
<td>10</td>
<td>100000</td>
<td>3444</td>
<td class="r">3411</td>
<td class="r">36223</td>
<td class="r">15</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
EOT
# Today Yesterday
# Qnty Size Length Length Size Qnty
# 3 455 34 3454 5656 3
# 1 1300 3664 3545 1000 10
# 10 100000 3444 3411 36223 15
require 'nokogiri'
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(html)
Use CSS to find the start of the table, and define some places to hold the data we're capturing:
table = doc.at('div#__DailyStat__ table')
today_data = []
yesterday_data = []
Loop over the rows in the table, rejecting the headers:
table.search('tr').each do |tr|
next if (tr['class'] == 'blh')
Initialize arrays to capture the pertinent data from each row, selectively push the data into the appropriate array:
today_td_data = [ 'Today' ]
yesterday_td_data = [ 'Yesterday' ]
tr.search('td').each do |td|
if (td['class'] == 'r')
yesterday_td_data << td.text.to_i
else
today_td_data << td.text.to_i
end
end
today_data << today_td_data
yesterday_data << yesterday_td_data
end
And output the data:
puts today_data.map{ |a| a.join(',') }
puts yesterday_data.map{ |a| a.join(',') }
> Today,3,455,34
> Today,1,1300,3664
> Today,10,100000,3444
> Yesterday,3454,5656,3
> Yesterday,3545,1000,10
> Yesterday,3411,36223,15
Just to help you visualize what's going, at the exit from the "tr" loop, the today_data and yesterday_data arrays are arrays-of-arrays looking like:
[["Today", 3, 455, 34], ["Today", 1, 1300, 3664], ["Today", 10, 100000, 3444]]
Alternatively, instead of looping over the "td" tags and sensing the class for the tag, I could have grabbed the contents of the "tr" and then used scan to grab the numbers and sliced the resulting array into "today" and "yesterday" arrays:
tr_data = tr.text.scan(/\d+/).map{ |i| i.to_i }
today_td_data = [ 'Today', *tr_data[0, 3] ]
yesterday_td_data = [ 'Yesterday', *tr_data[3, 3] ]
In real-world development, like at work, I'd use that instead of what I first wrote because it's succinct.
And notice that I didn't use XPath. It's very doable in Nokogiri to use XPath and accomplish this, but for simplicity I prefer CSS accessors. XPath would have allowed accessing individual "td" tag contents, but it also would begin to look like line-noise, which is something we want to avoid when writing code, because it impacts maintenance. I could also have used CSS to drill down to the correct "td" tags like 'tr td.r', but I don't think it would improve the code, it would just be an alternate way of doing it.