Question

Probably a pretty easy question:

I’m using Mechanize, Nokogori, and Xpath to parse through some html as such:

category = a.page.at("//li//a[text()='Test']")

Now, I want the term that I’m searching for in text()= to be dynamic…i.e. I want to create a local variable:

term = 'Test'

and embed that local ruby variable in the Xpath, if that makes sense.

Any ideas how?

My intuition was to treat this like string concatenation, but that doesn’t work out:

term = 'Test'
category = a.page.at("//li//a[text()=" + term + "]")

Answer 1

When you use category = a.page.at("//li//a[text()=" + term + "]"). The final result to method is //li//a[text()=Test] where test is not in quotes. So to put quotes around string you need to use escape character \.

   term = 'Test'
   category = a.page.at("//li//a[text()=\"#{term}\"]")

or

   category = a.page.at("//li//a[text()='" + term + "']")

or

   category = a.page.at("//li//a[text()='#{term}']")

For example:

>> a="In quotes" #=> "In quotes"

>> puts "This string is \"#{a}\""  #=> This string is "In quotes"
>> puts "This string is '#{a}'"    #=> This string is 'In quotes'
>> puts "This string is '"+a+"'"   #=> This string is 'In quotes'