Question

How do I get the page data of an other website somewhere on the web with ruby on rails?

Answer 1

You can use httparty to just get the data

Sample code (from example):

require File.join(dir, 'httparty')
require 'pp'

class Google
  include HTTParty
  format :html
end

# google.com redirects to www.google.com so this is live test for redirection
pp Google.get('http://google.com')

puts '', '*'*70, ''

# check that ssl is requesting right
pp Google.get('https://www.google.com')

Nokogiri really excels at parsing that data.. Here’s some example code from the Railscast:

url = "http://www.walmart.com/search/search-ng.do?search_constraint=0&ic=48_0&search_query=batman&Find.x=0&Find.y=0&Find=Find"
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open(url))
puts doc.at_css("title").text
doc.css(".item").each do |item|
  title = item.at_css(".prodLink").text
  price = item.at_css(".PriceCompare .BodyS, .PriceXLBold").text[/\$[0-9\.]+/]
  puts "#{title} - #{price}"
  puts item.at_css(".prodLink")[:href]
end