Question

I have trouble parsing a HTML table using Nokogiri and Ruby. My HTML table structure looks like this

<table>
<tbody>
    <tr>
       <td>Firstname</td>
       <td>Lastname</td>
       <td>Middle</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
       <td>ding</td>
       <td>dong</td>
       <td>ling</td>
    </tr>
    ....
    ....
    .... {more tr's and td's with similar data exists.}
    ....
    ....
    ....
    ....
    ....       
 </tbody>
 </table>

In the above HTML table I would like to entirely remove the first and corresponding elements, so remove Firstname, Lastname and Middle i.e., I want to start stripping the text only from the second . So this way I get only the contents of the table from the second or tr[2] and no column headers.

Can someone please provide me a code as to how to do this.

Thanks.

Answer 1

require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(x)
rows = doc.xpath('//table/tbody/tr[position() > 1]')

# OR

rows = doc.xpath("//table/tbody/tr")
header = rows.shift

After you’ve run either one of the above 2 snippets, rows will contain every <tr>...</tr> after the first one. For example puts rows.to_xml prints the following:

<tr><td>ding</td>
       <td>dong</td>
       <td>ling</td>
    </tr>

To get the inner text, removing all the html tags, run puts rows.text

ding
       dong
       ling

To get the inner text of the td tags only, run rows.xpath('td').map {|td| td.text }

["ding", "dong", "ling"]