Question

I want to parse a random website, modify the content so that every word is a link (for a dictionary tooltip) and then display the website in an iframe.

I’m not looking for a complete solution, but for a hint or a possible strategy. The linking is my problem, parsing the website and displaying it in an iframe is quite simple. So basically I have a String with all the html content. I’m not even sure if it’s better to do it serverside or after the page is loaded with JS.

I’m working with Ruby on Rails, jQuery, jRails.

Note: The content of the href tag depends on the word.

Clarification: I tried a regexp and it already kind of works:

@site.gsub!(/[A-Za-z]+(?:['-][A-Za-z]+)?|\\d+(?:[,.]\\d+)?/) {|word| '<a href=''>' + word + '</a>'} 

But the problem is to only replace words in the text and leave the HTML as it is. So I guess it is a regex problem…

Thanks for any ideas.

Answer 1

I don’t think a regexp is going to work for this – or, at least, it will always be brittle. A better way is to parse the page using Hpricot or Nokogiri, then go through it and modify the nodes that are plain text.