Question

I want to extract a specific link from a webpage, searching for it by its text, using Nokogiri:

<div class="links">
   <a href='http://example.org/site/1/'>site 1</a>
   <a href='http://example.org/site/2/'>site 2</a>
   <a href='http://example.org/site/3/'>site 3</a>
</div>

I would like the href of “site 3” and return:

http://example.org/site/3/

Or I would like the href of “site 1” and return:

http://example.org/site/1/

How can I do it?

Answer 1

Original:

text = <<TEXT
<div class="links">
  <a href='http://example.org/site/1/'>site 1</a>
  <a href='http://example.org/site/2/'>site 2</a>
  <a href='http://example.org/site/3/'>site 3</a>
</div>
TEXT

link_text = "site 1"

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(text)
p doc.xpath("//a[text()='#{link_text}']/@href").to_s

Updated:

As far as I know Nokogiri’s XPath implementation doesn’t support regular expressions, for basic starts with matching there’s a function called starts-with that you can use like this (links starting with “s”):

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(text)
array_of_hrefs = doc.xpath("//a[starts-with(text(), 's')]/@href").map(&:to_s)