Question

I am trying to get my Xpath query to output to new cell rows but I have not been successful.I am trying to get my output into colum A row by row instead of Row 1 Column A, B, C

My full code is at https://gist.github.com/3205801

Would it be best to use Axslx for this or is CSV the standard?

#Set encoding options to remove nasty Trademark symbols
  encoding_options = {
    :invalid           => :replace,  # Replace invalid byte sequences
    :undef             => :replace,  # Replace anything not defined in ASCII
    :replace           => '',        # Use a blank for those replacements
    :universal_newline => true       # Always break lines with \n
  }

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open("http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/ie/en/ho/WF06b/321957-321957-3329742-89318-89318-5186820-5231694.html?dnr=1"))
#For each break create a ;
doc.css('br').each{ |br| br.replace ';' }

clues = Array.new
clues << 'Operating system'
clues << 'Processors'

CSV.open("output.csv", "wb") do |csv|
  #1. Output the Clues header
  #2. Scrape the output/force encoding to remove special characters
    csv << clues
    csv << clues.map{|clue| doc.at("//td[text()='#{clue}']/following-sibling::td").text.strip.encode Encoding.find('ASCII'), encoding_options}
  #end loop
end

Answer 1

I am not sure I understand the question but I think you want the data like this:

header1,value1
header2,value2
header3,value3

rather than:

header1,header2,header3
value1,value2,value3

If this is true you can do:

CSV.open("output.csv", "wb") do |csv|
  clues.each do |one_clue|
    csv << one_clue
    xpath = "//td[text()='#{one_clue}']/following-sibling::td"
    csv << doc.at(xpath).text.strip.encode Encoding.find('ASCII'), encoding_options
  end
end