Comments on: Processing HTML with Hpricot

By: Amit Kulkarni

Amit Kulkarni — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 07:55:49 +0000

Another great tool using php language is htmlsql …
here you can extract all the links in your page by using the tag

select href from a

and you have all links in an array …

People with sql/php background find this very powerful

A ruby porting is also underway

By: satendra

satendra — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 08:13:54 +0000

By: Ryan

Ryan — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 10:56:16 +0000

I don't personally use Ruby, but XPath is a hell of a lot more enjoyable than trying to pull out data from XML (or almost XML) than trying to use DOM or similar. A relevant handy extension in Firefox is XPath Checker, which is very handy for testing out your XPath expressions.

By: madpilot

madpilot — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 06:53:06 +0000

Good call Jason – that’s an awesome application for Hpricot

By: Jason Stirk

Jason Stirk — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:42:43 +0000

I’ve also found hpricot insanely useful for processing RSS and Atom feeds. The number of malformed feeds out there is scary, and using a standard XML parser (like many RSS libraries do) means that a lot of these feeds can’t be read.

hpricot doesn’t have that problem, and you can still use XPath and search for elements you want easily.