Question

I decided to give Nokogiri a try, and copied the following program straight from http://nokogiri.rubyforge.org/nokogiri/Nokogiri.html (adding only the require 'rubygems' and the I_KNOW_I_AM_USING_AN_OLD_AND_BUGGY_VERSION_OF_LIBXML2 constant):

require 'rubygems'
I_KNOW_I_AM_USING_AN_OLD_AND_BUGGY_VERSION_OF_LIBXML2 = 1
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'

# Get a Nokogiri::HTML:Document for the page we’re interested in...

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open('http://www.google.com/search?q=tenderlove'))

# Do funky things with it using Nokogiri::XML::Node methods...

####
# Search for nodes by css
doc.css('h3.r a.l').each do |link|
  puts link.content
end

It returned no results. But when I changed

    doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open('http://www.google.com/search?q=tenderlove'))

to

    doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open('http://www.google.com/search?q=tenderlove').read)

the program worked as expected. Notice that the only difference was the addition of the .read at the end of the line. I would never have figured this out by myself, because just about every bit of example code leaves off the .read. The one place that included it, ironically was a post by one of the Nokogiri developers (at http://tenderlovemaking.com/2008/11/18/underpant-free-excitement). Did something in the API change? What am I missing?

I’m using Nokogiri 1.3.2.

Thank you.

Answer 1

I upgraded to Nokogiri 1.3.3, and upgraded libxml2 to 2.7.3. I no longer need to use the ridiculous I_KNOW_I_AM_USING_AN_OLD_AND_BUGGY_VERSION_OF_LIBXML2 = 1 statement to avoid error messages, and the program works without the extraneous .read.