Parsing html with regex in ruby

Question

Hello every one i have a html code as code bellow. I want to get the text inside <a>(.*)</a>

I want to get this result:

data 1 : hello1
data 2 : hello2
data 3 : hello3

from that input:

<a>
hello1
</a>
<a>
hello2
</a>
<a>
hello3
</a>

Answer 1

To expand on the two comments, the following Nokogiri code will work for your example. You can use either xpath or CSS. A dedicated parser is much more powerful than rolling your own regex.

> require 'nokogiri'
 => true 
> doc = Nokogiri::HTML("<a>hello1</a><a>hello2</a><a>hello3</a>")
 => #<Nokogiri::HTML::Document:0x3ffec2494f48 name="document" children=[#<Nokogiri::XML::DTD:0x3ffec2494bd8 name="html">, #<Nokogiri::XML::Element:0x3ffec2494458 name="html" children=[#<Nokogiri::XML::Element:0x3ffec2494250 name="body" children=[#<Nokogiri::XML::Element:0x3ffec2494048 name="a" children=[#<Nokogiri::XML::Text:0x3ffec2493e40 "hello1">]>, #<Nokogiri::XML::Element:0x3ffec249dc88 name="a" children=[#<Nokogiri::XML::Text:0x3ffec249da80 "hello2">]>, #<Nokogiri::XML::Element:0x3ffec249d878 name="a" children=[#<Nokogiri::XML::Text:0x3ffec249d670 "hello3">]>]>]>]> 
> doc.css('a').each { |node| p node.text }
"hello1"
"hello2"
"hello3"
 => 0 

Update: You'll need the nokogiri gem if you don't have it installed already.

sudo gem install nokogiri

Depending on your setup, you may also need to prepend

require 'rubygems'