Question

What I need

Execute Nokogiri query, add a line break so when data is outputted its not bunched up.

data = doc.css('div#specifications div#spec-area ul.product-spec')[0].text 

I tried this

data = doc.css('div#specifications div#spec-area ul.product-spec')[0].css('li').each{ |li| li.replace '\n' }.text 

My Full Code

require 'Nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'
require 'spreadsheet'

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open("http://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/ASUS_TAICHI_21/#specifications"))

#Grab our product specifications - we only need the text not HTML
data = doc.css('div#specifications div#spec-area ul.product-spec')[0].text 

#Create the Spreadsheet
Spreadsheet.client_encoding = 'UTF-8'
book = Spreadsheet::Workbook.new

sheet1 = book.create_worksheet
sheet1.name = 'My First Worksheet'

#Output our data  to the Spreadsheet
sheet1[0,0] = data
book.write 'C:/Users/Barry/Desktop/output.xls'

Answer 1

You don’t want to replace the list elements, you just want to map them to their texts and then join them together separated by newlines.

If you grab the elements with this:

data = doc.css('div#specifications div#spec-area ul.product-spec li')

Then you can get a list of all the list elements separated by linebreaks using map and join, like this:

lines = data.map(&:text).join("\n")

(From the comments) I’ve never used ruby spreadsheet before, but this should allow you to input the data:

data = doc.css('div#specifications div#spec-area ul.product-spec li')
data.each_with_index { |line, i| sheet1[i,0] = line.text }

Hope that helps.

p.s. “nokogiri” in require "nokogiri" should be all lowercase.