You have to keep in mind that Watir was built for interacting with a web
broswer, usually for test automation of websites.  If you are just going
to go to a web page and pull down information, you might just want to
use Hpricot instead. You can just load the html into a string (using
something like the open-uri gem) and pass it to the Hpricot object, and
then query for your data by using the DOM path to the data you want.
For example, this textbox that I'm typing into has a DOM path of
/html/body/div/div/div/div/div/div/form/table/tr/td/textarea  ( There
are shortcuts to that if there are class and id tags present)  You can
get the DOM path by using either the Firefox browser with the Firebug
plug in, or the Chrome browser, right click on the element you need,
select "inspect  element". A web search for 'ruby hpricot' will turn up
lots of howto pages that can explain it all better :)
Good Luck!

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