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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T08:23:32+00:00

Basically all I would like to do is export a whole html table to

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Basically all I would like to do is export a whole html table to a .txt file (notepad document).

So far I have learnt how to instruct the browser to find the html page with the table.

require 'rubygems' 
require 'hpricot' 
require "watir-webdriver" 
url = "http://www.example.com"
browser = Watir::Browser.new 
browser.goto url

After running the above in cmd I can now see the html table in the browser.

This is where I am stuck. How do I use Watir to

  1. Find the tag
  2. collect everything (i.e. the html , and the text) which is within and .
  3. Extract those results to a .txt file (notepad document) and save it in a specific folder.

FYI the html table looks like this…

<table border="1" cellpadding="2">
<tr>
<th> Address </th>
<th> Council tax band </th>
<th> Annual council tax </th>
</tr>

<tr>
<td> 2, STONELEIGH AVENUE, COVENTRY, CV5 6BZ </td>
<td align="center"> F </td>
<td align="center"> &pound;2125 </td>
</tr>

……. The above row is repeated many time ……

</table>

Then the table is closed.

So to re-cap my situation. I can use Watir to navigate the browser to the page containing the html table but my problem is that I am unsure of how to extract the results (everything within the tag – including the html) to a .txt file and then save that .txt file onto my computer.

I would prefer to take smaller steps with using Watir. I am knew to it therefore I would just like to learn how to extract the table and save everything that I have extracted into a .txt file. I have seen a couple of examples online using hpricot. However most of the examples seem to miss off code detailing how the array (if that is the correct approach) is outputted into a .txt file.

Could you help by demonstrating how to write a simple piece of code which will extract the html table ( and everything, including the , and everything in between) to a .txt notepad file?

Many thanks for your time.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    To get HTML of the entire table (if it is the only table on the page):

    browser.table.html

    You will get something like this:

    => "<table border=\"1\" cellpadding=\"2\">\n<tbody><tr>\n<th> Address </th>\n<th> Council tax band </th>\n<th> Annual council tax </th>\n</tr>\n\n<tr>\n<td> 2, STONELEIGH AVENUE, COVENTRY, CV5 6BZ </td>\n<td align=\"center\"> F </td>\n<td align=\"center\"> £2125 </td>\n</tr>\n\n</tbody></table>"

    To get HTML of each row and put it in an array:

    browser.table.trs.collect {|tr| tr.html}

=> ["<tr>\n<th> Address </th>\n<th> Council tax band </th>\n<th> Annual council tax </th>\n</tr>",
    "<tr>\n<td> 2, STONELEIGH AVENUE, COVENTRY, CV5 6BZ </td>\n<td align=\"center\"> F </td>\n<td align=\"center\"> £2125 </td>\n</tr>"]

    To get text of each cell and put it in an array:

    browser.table.trs.collect {|tr| [tr[0].text, tr[1].text, tr[2].text]}
=> [["Address", "Council tax band", "Annual council tax"],
    ["2, STONELEIGH AVENUE, COVENTRY, CV5 6BZ", "F", "£2125"]]

    To write text of each cell to file:

    content = b.table.trs.collect {|tr| [tr[0].text, tr[1].text, tr[2].text]}
File.open("table.txt", "w") {|file| file.puts content}

    The file will look like this:

    Address
Council tax band
Annual council tax
2, STONELEIGH AVENUE, COVENTRY, CV5 6BZ
F
£2125
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