Question

I am trying to extract list of DIVs whose class = “child”, and associate the “child” with a DIV whose class = “header” that occur before it.

For example:

<div class=header>HEADER A</div>
<div class=child>CHILD A.1</div>
<div class=child>CHILD A.2</div>
<div class=child>CHILD A.3</div>
<div class=header>HEADER B</div>
<div class=child>CHILD B.1</div>
<div class=child>CHILD B.2</div>
<div class=child>CHILD B.3</div>

I expect to have something like below

HEADER A --> CHILD A.1
HEADER A --> CHILD A.2
HEADER A --> CHILD A.3
HEADER B --> CHILD B.1
HEADER B --> CHILD B.2
HEADER B --> CHILD B.3

Answer 1

A more ‘xpathy’ version:

doc.xpath('//div[@class="child"]').each do |node|
    header = node.at('./preceding-sibling::div[@class="header"][1]')
    puts header.text + " --> " + node.text
end