Question

So basically what I am doing is creating a list of URLs that I am parsing from a specific url…in this case, the base url is the local variable url.

What I want to do is, pass url to my_list – which works fine now…but once I have that list, I then want to pass the first element of the array list declared in the method my_list to the method add_category.

See the code:

def add_category(url)
    new_url = url + '/web'  
end

url = 'http://www.someurl.com'

def my_list(url)
    root = Nokogiri::HTML(open(url))
    list = root.css("a").map do |link|
        [link.text, link[:href]]           
      end

end

my_list(url)

add_category(list[0])

Where I am going is, I want to modify every single URL in the list array per the rules I specify in the add_category method.

Thoughts?

Answer 1

You cannot refer to method’s local variables from outside. They are called “local” for a reason! 🙂

It seems that your my_list method is simply generating a list that you want to use later. So, save its return value to a local variable (in the caller scope) and use however you want. Check this out:

def add_category(url)
    url + '/web'  
end

url = 'http://www.someurl.com'

def my_list(url)
    root = Nokogiri::HTML(open(url))
    root.css("a").map do |link|
        [link.text, link[:href]]           
    end
end

list = my_list(url)

new_url = add_category(list[0][1])