Question

The following works but is always very slow, seemingly halting my scraping program and its Firefox or Chrome browser for even whole minutes per page:

pp recArray = $browser.table(:id,"recordTable").to_a

Getting the HTML table’s text or html source is fast though:

htmlcode = $browser.table(:id,"recordTable").html  # .text shows only plaintext portion like lynx

How might I be able to create the same recArray (each element from a <TR>) using for example a Nokogiri object holding only that table’s html?

recArray = Nokogiri::HTML(htmlcode). ??

Answer 1

You want each tr in the table?

Nokogiri::HTML($browser.html).css('table[@id="recordTable"] > tr')

This gives a NodeSet which can be more useful than Array. Of course there’s still to_a