Get text directly inside a tag in Nokogiri

ruby nokogiri
Mridang Agarwalla picture Mridang Agarwalla · May 29, 2012 · Viewed 16.6k times · Source

I have some HTML that looks like:

<dt>
  <a href="#">Hello</a>
  (2009)
</dt>

I already have all my HTML loaded into a variable called record. I need to parse out the year i.e. 2009 if it exists.

How can I get the text inside the dt tag but not the text inside the a tag? I've used record.search("dt").inner_text and this gives me everything.

It's a trivial question but I haven't managed to figure this out.

Answer

Casper picture Casper · May 29, 2012

To get all the direct children with text, but not any further sub-children, you can use XPath like so:

doc.xpath('//dt/text()')

Or if you wish to use search:

doc.search('dt').xpath('text()')

Related questions

Why does installing Nokogiri on Mac OS fail with libiconv is missing?

I've been trying to install Nokogiri on Mac OS 10.9.3 and whatever I try, the install fails in the end with the following error message: $ sudo gem install nokogiri -- --with-xml2-include=/usr/local/Cellar/libxml2/2.9.1/include/libxml2 --with-xml2-lib=/usr/…

Read More
How to access attributes using Nokogiri

I have a simple task of accessing the values of some attributes. This is a simple script that uses Nokogiri::XML::Builder to create a simple XML doc. require 'nokogiri' builder = Nokogiri::XML::Builder.new(:encoding => 'UTF-8') do |…

Read More
How do I use XPath in Nokogiri?

I have not found any documentation nor tutorial for that. Does anything like that exist? doc.xpath('//table/tbody[@id="threadbits_forum_251"]/tr') The code above will get me any table, anywhere, that has a tbody child with the …

Read More