Question

I have a requirement to read a third-party public website. Currently I am able to do this via Nokogiri, but I’m having trouble writing some unit tests using rspec.

I have this HTML <div>:

<div class="user">
  <div class="name">User Name</div>
</div>

In my Reader model I have the method name, which reads the name from the HTML:

class SampleReader
    def name(html_div)
      html_div.css('name')
    end
end

In my RSpec test case I pass the above HTML <div> as a string to the name method and I get the following error:

undefined method `css' for #<String:0x007fd8a0b39c98>

I believe it’s because Nokogiri cannot identified the string as HTML, so I would appreciate if someone can help me write the test case. And, if possible, my preferred option is to pass only the <div> string, not the entire HTML page source, to the method.

• I’m using Rails 3.2.9
• Rspec2
• Nokogiri

Answer 1

You’ll need to wrap the HTML string as a Nokogiri document:

require 'nokogiri'

str = <<-HTML
<div class="user">
  <div class="name">User Name</div>
</div>
HTML

class SampleReader
  def name(html_div)
    doc = Nokogiri::HTML(html_div)
    doc.css('.name').text
  end
end

reader = SampleReader.new
puts reader.name(str) #=> "User Name"

Also, don’t forget to upgrade your application to rails 3.2.11.