Web Scraping With Ruby
Introduction to web scraping with Ruby. How to handle http connections, parse html files for data, best practices, tips and an example project.
When web scraping, the most common way to navigate HTML data is to find elements by class name. For that, we can use CSS or XPath Selectors:
.class
notation, which will find any nodes that contain full class name:`.some-class`
will match:
`<a class="some-class"></a>`
`<a class="first some-class third"></a>`
[class*="<partial>"]
notation which will find any nodes that contain a given string:`[class*="some-class"]`
will match:
`<a class="some-class"></a>`
`<a class="first some-class third"></a>`
Alternatively, XPath selectors can be used with similar functions:
//*[@class="link"]
will find any element where the class is exactly equal to "link"
//*[contains(@class, "link")]
will find any element where class contains the string "link"