Question

element on the page has needed content that i’m trying to pull
here’s the element.content after a parse with Nokogiri

["\n       \n       \n       \n          itemId[0]=1234;\n       \n        \n          \n        \n       \n       \n       \n        My Project: First Edition\n       \n      ", "\n       \n       \n       \n          itemId[1]=2345;\n       \n        \n          \n        \n       \n       \n       \n        My Second Edition\n       \n      ", "\n       \n       \n       \n          itemId[2]=1234;\n       \n        \n          \n        \n       \n       \n       \n        Third\n       \n          \n"]

I was able to get the RegEx for the itemId[0]=1234 which is (/itemId.\d+..\d{4}/) but I’m totally stuck on how to grab the names of the content. Any advice? Perhaps I can just parse with Ruby through HTML?

Answer 1

Given a string like this:

s= "\n       \n       \n       \n          itemId[0]=1234;\n       \n        \n          \n        \n       \n       \n       \n        My Project: First Edition\n       \n      "

You could do this:

m    = s.match(/(itemId\[\d+\]=\d+);(.*)/m)
item = m[1]
# itemId[0]=1234
name = m[2].strip
# My Project: First Edition

Basically you pull out the itemId... part using (more or less) or existing expression, grab the rest of the string ((.*)) in multi-line mode (/m, so that . matches a newline), and then strip off the offending whitespace outside the regex using strip. You don’t have to build one unreadable regex that does everything you need, post-processing a match result is allowed and sometimes even encouraged.