Question

I’m using Nokogiri for a simple example to get council tax bands for a postcode (http://www.voa.gov.uk/cti/InitS.asp?lcn=0)

Here is the code I have at the moment:

 a = Mechanize.new{ |agent|  agent.user_agent_alias = 'Mac Safari'}
 a.get('http://www.voa.gov.uk/cti/InitS.asp?lcn=0') do |page|
      form = page.form_with(:id => "frmInitSForm")
      form.txtPostCode = "NN15 6UA"
      page = a.submit form

      page.search("tr").each do |tr|
        textF = tr.text.strip
        textF.gsub!(/[\n]+/, "\n")
        puts textF

      end

    end
  end

At the moment this prints out all text inside the tr

I then need inside the do something similar to

tdFirst = tr.children("td:first").text
tdSecond = tr.children("td:nth-child(2)").text

How do I get the first and second td?

Answer 1

In your inner block, try

tdFirst, tdSecond = tr.xpath('td')[0,2].map {|td| td.inner_text.strip}
puts "%s; %s" % [tdFirst, tdSecond]