Question

Consider the following html as an example. its a scratch sheet I made to practice, but it has a snippet of the real html I am trying to work with.

http://www.carbide-red.com/prog/test_table.html

I am trying to locate a column and the only consistant identifier I can find is the background color (bgcolor).

<tr bgcolor="#ffffcc">
    <td bgcolor="yellow" class="date" align=center>Equipment</td>
    <td bgcolor="#ccccff" align=center class="date"><font color=black>8/12/12</font></td>
    <td bgcolor="#ccccff" align=center class="date"><font color=black>8/19/12</font></td>
    <td bgcolor="#ccccff" align=center class="date"><font color=black>8/26/12</font></td>
    <td bgcolor="#ccccff" align=center class="date"><font color=black>9/2/12</font></td>
    <td bgcolor="red" align=center class="date"><font color=yellow>9/9/12</font></td>
    <td bgcolor="#ccffcc" align=center class="date"><font color=black>9/16/12</font></td>
    <td bgcolor="#ccffcc" align=center class="date"><font color=black>9/23/12</font></td>
    <td bgcolor="#ccffcc" align=center class="date"><font color=black>9/30/12</font></td>
    <td bgcolor="#ccffcc" align=center class="date"><font color=black>10/7/12</font></td>
</tr>

I’m trying to find the <td> that has bgcolor=red. I would then like to save the column index of that cell, so that I can then use it to select the same column of the following rows.

But I can’t seem to find a way to search for the bgcolor= tag. And I have not been able to find a way to get Watir to report back the column/row indexs to store in a variable. But if I can find the bgcolor= tag then I can search for like “equipment” and then count until I find the correct tag.

I know the html code is not ideal due to there note being any “name” or anything unique identifier, but I can’t change that.

I am very new to Ruby & Watir. I tried to manipulate a website in Perl and it was was not going very well, and I discovered Watir and it did exactly what I needed (and suprisingly easy), but now I am trying to understand Ruby as well as the finer semantics.

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

To get text of <td bgcolor="red"> try this:

browser.element(:css => "td[bgcolor=red]").text

You should get back "9/9/12". To click the element, replace text with click.

To put it’s index in variable index try this:

index = nil
browser.tds.each_with_index {|td, i| index = i if td.attribute_value("bgcolor") == "red" or td.attribute_value("bgcolor") == "#ff0000"}

index variable should be 5.