why can't i wrap <span> around the rfollowing nokogiri xpath? - ruby

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open(url)).xpath("//*")
.xpath("//*[br]/text()[string-length(normalize-space()) != 0]")
.wrap("<span></span>")
puts doc
it just returns the text ... i was expecting the full html source with now wrapped around the specified xpath elements.

Try
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open(url)).xpath("//*")
.xpath("//*[br and text()[string-length(normalize-space()) != 0]]")
.wrap("<span></span>")
puts doc
What your XPath does is it fetches the non-empty text nodes. Which by their very definition don't contain any markup.
In contrast, my XPath fetches any node that contains at least one <br> and at least one non-empty text node.

Related

Can I use Selenium and Nokogiri to locate an element based on a nearby label?

Let's say I want to scrape the "Weight" attribute from the following content on a website:
<div>
<h2>Details</h2>
<ul>
<li><b>Height:</b>6 ft</li>
<li><b>Weight:</b>6 kg</li>
<li><b>Age:</b>6</li>
</ul>
</div>
All I want is "6 kg". But it's not labeled, and neither is anything around it. But I know that I always want the text after "Weight:". Is there a way of selecting an element based on the text near it or in it?
In pseudocode, this is what it might look like:
require 'selenium-webdriver'
require 'nokogiri'
doc = parsed document
div_of_interest = doc.div where text of h2 == "Details"
element_of_interest = <li> element in div_of_interest with content that contains the string "Weight:"
selected_text = (content in element) minus ("<b>Weight:</b>")
Is this possible?
You can write the following code
p driver.find_elements(xpath: "//li").detect{|li| li.text.include?'Weight'}.text[/:(.*)/,1]
output
"6 kg"
My suggestion is to use WATIR which is wrapper around Ruby Selenium Binding where you can easily write the following code
p b.li(text: /Weight/).text[/:(.*)/,1]
Yes.
require 'nokogiri'
Nokogiri::HTML.parse(File.read(path_to_file))
.css("div > ul > li")
.children # get the 'li' items
.each_slice(2) # pair a 'b' item and the text following it
.find{|b, text| b.text == "Weight:"}
.last # extract the text element
.text
will return
"6 kg"
You can locate the element through pure xpath: use the contains() function which returns Boolean is its second argument found in the first, and pass to it text() (which returns the text of the node) and the target string.
xpath_locator = '/div/ul/li[contains(text(), "Weight:")]'
value = driver.find_element(:xpath, xpath_locator).text.partition('Weight:').last
Then just get the value after "Weight:".

How to find an element's text in Capybara while ignoring inner element text

In the HTML example below I am trying to grab the $16.95 text in the outer span.price element and exclude the text from the inner span.sale one.
<div class="price">
<span class="sale">
<span class="sale-text">"Low price!"</span>
"$16.95"
</span>
</div>
If I was using Nokogiri this wouldn't be too difficult.
price = doc.css('sale')
price.search('.sale-text').remove
price.text
However Capybara navigates rather than removes nodes. I knew something like price.text would grab text from all sub elements, so I tried to use xpath to be more specific. p.find(:xpath, "//span[#class='sale']", :match => :first).text. However this grabs text from the inner element as well.
Finally, I tried looping through all spans to see if I could separate the results but I get an Ambiguous error.
p.find(:css, 'span').each { |result| puts result.text }
Capybara::Ambiguous: Ambiguous match, found 2 elements matching css "span"
I am using Capybara/Selenium as this is for a web scraping project with authentication complications.
There is no single statement way to do this with Capybara since the DOMs concept of innerText doesn't really support what you want to do. Assuming p is the '.price' element, two ways you could get what you want are as follows:
Since you know the node you want to ignore just subtract that text from the whole text
p.find('span.sale').text.sub(p.find('span.sale-text').text, '')
Grab the innerHTML string and parse that with Nokogiri or Capybara.string (which just wraps Nokogiri elements in the Capybara DSL)
doc = Capybara.string(p['innerHTML'])
nokogiri_fragment = doc.native
#do whatever you want with the nokogiri fragment

Get a specific tag in a node?

I'm using Ruby, XPath and Nokogiri and trying to retrieve d1 from the following XML:
<a>
<b1>
<c>
<d1>01/11/2001</d1>
<d2>02/02/2004</d2>
</c>
</b1>
</a>
This is my code in a loop:
rs = doc.xpath("//a/b1/c/d1").inner_text
puts rs
It returns nothing (No error).
I want to get the text in <d1>.
You don't ask for the text content in your xpath query:
rs = doc.xpath('//a/b1/c/d1/text()')
You're misusing XPath:
require 'nokogiri'
doc = Nokogiri::XML(<<EOT)
<a>
<b1>
<c>
<d1>01/11/2001</d1>
<d2>02/02/2004</d2>
</c>
</b1>
</a>
EOT
doc.at('/a/b1/c/d1').text # => "01/11/2001"
doc.at('//d1').text # => "01/11/2001"
// in XPath-ese means start at the top and look anywhere in your document. Instead, if you're supplying an explicit/absolute selector, start at the top of the document and drill down using '/a/b1/c/d1'. Or, do the simple thing and let the parser search through the document for that particular node using //d1. You can do that if you know there's a single instance of that node.
In my code above, I used at instead of xpath. at returns the first matching node, which is similar to using xpath('//d1').first. xpath returns a NodeSet, which is like an array of nodes, whereas at returns a Node only. Using inner_text on a NodeSet is likely to not give you the results you want, which would be the text of a particular node, so be careful there.
doc.xpath('/a/b1/c/d1/text()').class # => Nokogiri::XML::NodeSet
doc.xpath('//c').inner_text # => "\n 01/11/2001\n 02/02/2004\n "
doc.xpath('/a/b1/c/d1').first.text # => "01/11/2001"
Look at the following lines. Instead of using XPath selectors, I used CSS, which tends to be more readable. Nokogiri supports both.
doc.at('d1').text # => "01/11/2001"
doc.at('a b1 c d1').text # => "01/11/2001"
Also, notice the type of data returned from these two lines:
doc.at('/a/b1/c/d1/text()').class # => Nokogiri::XML::Text
doc.at('/a/b1/c/d1').text.class # => String
While it might seem good/smart to tell the parser to locate the text() node inside <d1>, what will be returned isn't text, and will need to be accessed further to make it usable, so consider forgoing the use of text() unless you know exactly why you need it:
doc.at('/a/b1/c/d1/text()').text # => "01/11/2001"
Finally, Nokogiri has many methods used for locating nodes. As I said above, xpath returns a NodeSet and at returns a Node. xpath is really an XPath-specific version of Nokogiri's search method. search, css and xpath all return NodeSets. at, at_css and at_xpath all return Nodes. The CSS and XPath variants are useful when you have an ambiguous selector that you need to be used as CSS or XPath specifically. Most of the time Nokogiri can figure whether it's CSS or XPath on its own and will do the right thing, so it's OK to use the generic search and at for the majority of your coding. Use the specific versions when you have to specify one or the other.

use YQL with substring-before in xpath

I am trying to get a string before '--' within a paragraph in an html page using the xpath and send it to yql
for example i want to get the date from the following article:
<div>
<p>Date --- the body of the article</p>
</div>
I tried this query in yql:
select * from html where url="article url" and xpath="//div/p/text()/[substring-before(.,'--')]"
but it does not work.
how can I get the date of the article which is before the '--'
You can simply use:
substring-before(//div/p,'--')
Use:
substring-before(/div/p/text(), '--')
This XPath expression evaluates to the string immediately preceding '--' in the first text node in the XML document, that is a child of a p that is a child of the div top element.
In case you want to get this value for every such text node, you have to use an expression like:
substring-before((//div/p/text())[$k], '--')
and evaluate this expression $N times, for $k = 1,2, ..., $N
where $N is count(//div/p/text())
Do note: Try to avoid using the // XPath pseudo-operator always when the structure of the XML document is statically known. Using // usually results in big inefficiency (O(N^2)) that are felt especially painful on big XML documents.

Use Nokogiri to get all nodes in an element that contain a specific attribute name

I'd like to use Nokogiri to extract all nodes in an element that contain a specific attribute name.
e.g., I'd like to find the 2 nodes that contain the attribute "blah" in the document below.
#doc = Nokogiri::HTML::DocumentFragment.parse <<-EOHTML
<body>
<h1 blah="afadf">Three's Company</h1>
<div>A love triangle.</div>
<b blah="adfadf">test test test</b>
</body>
EOHTML
I found this suggestion (below) at this website: http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/7994, but it doesn't return the 2 nodes in the example above. It returns an empty array.
# get elements with attribute:
elements = #doc.xpath("//*[#*[blah]]")
Thoughts on how to do this?
Thanks!
I found this here
elements = #doc.xpath("//*[#*[blah]]")
This is not a useful XPath expression. It says to give you all elements that have attributes that have child elements named 'blah'. And since attributes can't have child elements, this XPath will never return anything.
The DZone snippet is confusing in that when they say
elements = #doc.xpath("//*[#*[attribute_name]]")
the inner square brackets are not literal... they're there to indicate that you put in the attribute name. Whereas the outer square brackets are literal. :-p
They also have an extra * in there, after the #.
What you want is
elements = #doc.xpath("//*[#blah]")
This will give you all the elements that have an attribute named 'blah'.
You can use CSS selectors:
elements = #doc.css "[blah]"

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