Question

I would like to extract the value of some form tags. The value is unknown to me at runtime.

I have found several threads that come close, but they all focus on HTML parsing and scraping.

I already have the HTML source and the names of the form fields that I need the value for.

example:

<input type="hidden" name="currentRackU" id="currentRackU" value="11">

I can use a regex to get to ‘id=”currentRackU” value=’ but I now need to get the next characters until the closing quotes.

Answer 1

While it’s true that HTML/XML shouldn’t necessarily be parsed with a regular expression, here’s something that may help you. It scans the tag and returns a hash of the attributes and their values:

html = '<input type="hidden" name="currentRackU" id="currentRackU" value="11">'
Hash[html.scan(/(\w+)="(.*?)"/)]
#=> {"type"=>"hidden", "name"=>"currentRackU", "id"=>"currentRackU", "value"=>"11"}