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.
To select elements by class using XPath we can match the @class
attribute using contains()
function or the =
operator.
For example, to select <a class="link"></a>
we could use //a[@class="link"]
or //a[contains(@class, "link")]
selectors. See this interactive example:
Note that using contains()
might match partial matches. For example, disabled-link
would be matched by our contains(@class, "link")
selector.
To match by a single class we can use contains(concat(" ", normalize-space(@class), " "), " match ")
pattern:
Tip: If you're using Python's parsel
package then there's an equivalent shortcut has-class()
. For example, //a[has-class("link")]