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On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 4:10 PM, Paul <tester.paul / gmail.com> wrote:

> On Oct 5, 9:33 pm, Steel Steel <angel_st... / ymail.com> wrote:
> > > I can find the section I want with a regex but I don't know how to
> > > iterate through the string looking for particular elements.  I was
> > > thinking about taking the section I'm interested in and saving it as
> > > an array and then iterating through each array element (html line)
> > > that way, but I thought there might be a quicker way to do it.
> >
> > $html.scan(%r{<div.*first section.*</div>}m).to_s.scan(/<li>/).size
>
> Thanks Steel.  This worked fine.  I just needed to make it a lazy
> search with .*?
>
> I've got nothing against Nokogiri or the other solutions but I was
> hoping for a solution like this that just uses the core libraries for
> portability.
>
> Cheers!  Paul.
>
>
I would try REXML, then. It's an XML parser in the standard library.
http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/rexml/rdoc/index.html

I'd be reserve regex parsing of xml only for very informal situations where
I just a quick solution non rigorous solution (ie a one-time solution that I
plan to verify personally), I am pretty sure that it is not possible to
correctly parse xml with regex.

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