Question

i am screenscraping using watir and i download a xls file. when i open this file in notepad, i find that its just a bunch of html tables. is there a any function or gem that will convert this page into a bunch of arrays.
any ideas is appreciated.

Answer 1

1. Narrow it down to …
2. Clear out the whitespace
3. Replace the tabs with “
4. Replace tags with “,
5. Replace the & & tags with nothing
6. Replace the tags with |
7. Split the rows with |
8. Split the fields with ,

You can simplify it a little bit more, but that’s the gist of it.