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Asked: 2026-06-01T18:24:48+00:00

I have a HTML doc to parse and read a bunch of stuff from

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I have a HTML doc to parse and read a bunch of stuff from there. The problem is the html has multiple tables in it, and I am only interested in one table. Plus I want to read only the lines that having some useful content. Here is sample html page, there are two tables with no ID, and I want only the second table and only the lines that are useful to humans. 

<HTML>
<BODY>

<TABLE>
  <TR>
    <TD> I don't want this table </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD></TD>
    <TD> No No No <br></TD>
  </TR>
....
</TABLE>


<TABLE>
  <TR>
    <TD>04/13/2012 22:51  I want this table </TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD></TD>
    <TD> First - something there <br></TD>
  </TR>
  <TR>
    <TD>04/13/2012 23:23  Update from xyz</TD></TR>
  <TR>
    <TD></TD>
    <TD>Second - something here <br></TD>
  </TR>
</TABLE>


</BODY>
</HTML>

I am trying this code, which is obviously not working. The o/p is not the text I want. It includes both tables, I only want the second table. help!

require 'curb'
require 'nokogiri'
c = Curl::Easy.perform("http://server/cgi-bin/page.cgi?id=123456")
html_doc = Nokogiri::HTML(c.body_str.to_s)
puts html_doc.xpath("//table/tr/td")
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Have you tried the xpath of //table[2]/tr/td to get the second table. If you can change the source of the HTML the best solution would be to provide id attributes for your tables.

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