Bruce D'Arcus schrieb: > For some reason I don't understand, the below fragment all works, > except for the author attribute is always blank. The problem is not > with my regular expression pattern. > > Could someone explain what I'm doing wrong? Hi Bruce, I don't know which libraries you're using, but could it be that you can only read once from article, like reading from a file? Instead of > open(article_url) do |article| > # screen-scrap for article author and title > title = article.read.scan(title_match) > # for whatever reason, author never returns anything > author = article.read.scan(author_match) try something like open(article_url) do |article| # screen-scrap for article author and title article_text = article.read title = article_text.scan(title_match) author = article_text.scan(author_match) HTH Regards, Pit