Question

I have a web page. The HTML source contains this text:

<meta property="og:title" content="John"/>

John is an example, the name may vary.
I am sure that og:title will appear only once in the text.
This is my code:

$browser.goto( url )
x = $browser.html.gsub( /^.*<meta property="og:title" content="(.+?)".>/m, '\1' )

I expected to find the name John in my variable x
The ‘\1’ should give me the first part I put in the parenthesis, i.e. (.+?), i.e. John, right?
Also, I used a dot . to match a slash / , is there a better way?

Answer 1

If you only want the value of content:

html = '<meta property="og:title" content="John"/>'
=> "<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"John\"/>"
html[/property="og:title" content="([^"]+)"/, 1]
=> "John"

If you’re not familiar with regex, "([^"]+)" might throw you. It means “from the first ", grab everything until the next ". In effect it means “grab everything inside the double-quotes.