Question

How can I get only the text of the node <p> which has other tags in it like:

<p>hello my website is <a href="www.website.com">click here</a> <b>test</b></p>

I only want “hello my website is“

This is what I tried:

begin
  node = html_doc.css('p')
  node.each do |node|
    node.children.remove
  end
  return (node.nil?) ? ''  : node.text
rescue
  return ''
end

Answer 1

Update 2: all right, well you are removing all children with node.children.remove, including the text nodes, a proposed solution might look like:

# 1. select all <p> nodes
doc.css('p').
  # 2. map children, and flatten
  map { |node| node.children }.flatten.
  # 3. select text nodes only
  select { |node| node.text? }.
  # 4. get text and join
  map { |node| node.text }.join(' ').strip

This sample returns “hello my website is”, but note that doc.css('p') als finds <p> tags within <p> tags.

Update: sorry, misread your question, you only want “hello my website is”, see solution above, original answer:

Not directly with nokogiri, but the sanitize gem might be an option: https://github.com/rgrove/sanitize/

Sanitize.clean(html, {}) # => " hello my website is click here test "

FYI, it uses nokogiri internally.