Question

Let’s say i have the following HTML:

<ul><li>Bullet 1.</li>
<li>Bullet 2.</li>
<li>Bullet 3.</li>
<li>Bullet 4.</li>
<li>Bullet 5.</li></ul>

What I wish to do with it, is replace any periods, question marks or exclamation marks with itself and a trailing asterisk, that is inside an HTML node, then convert back to HTML. So the result would be:

<ul><li>Bullet 1.*</li>
<li>Bullet 2.*</li>
<li>Bullet 3.*</li>
<li>Bullet 4.*</li>
<li>Bullet 5.*</li></ul>

I’ve been messing around with this a bit in IRB, but can’t quite figure it out. here’s the code i have:

 html = "<ul><li>Bullet 1.</li>
<li>Bullet 2.</li>
<li>Bullet 3.</li>
<li>Bullet 4.</li>
<li>Bullet 5.</li></ul>"

doc = Nokogiri::HTML::DocumentFragment.parse(html)
doc.search("*").map { |n| n.inner_text.gsub(/(?<=[.!?])(?!\*)/, "#{$1}*") }

The array that comes back is parsed out correctly, but I’m just not sure on how to convert it back into HTML. Is there another method i can use to modify the inner_text as such?

Answer 1

What about this code?

doc.traverse do |x|
  if x.text?
    x.content = x.content.gsub(/(?<=[.!?])(?!\*)/, "#{$1}*")
  end
end

The traverse method does pretty much the same as search("*").each. Then you check that the node is a Nokogiri::XML::Text and, if so, change the content as you wished.