nokogiri + mechanize css selector by text

Question

I am new to nokogiri and so far most familiar with CSS selectors, I am trying to parse information from a table, below is a sample of the table and the code I'm using, I'm stuck on the appropriate if statement, as it seems to return the whole contents of the table.

Table:

<div class="holder">
  <div class ="row">
   <div class="c1">
     <!-- Content I Don't need -->
   </div>
   <div class="c2">
    <span class="data">
     <!-- Content I Don't Need -->
    <span class="data">
   </div>
 </div>
 ...
 <div class="row">
  <div class="c1">
   SPECIFIC TEXT
  </div>
  <div class="c2">
   <span class="data">
    What I want
   </span>
  </div>
 </div>
</div>

My Script: (if SPECIFIC TEXT is found in the table it returns every "div.c2 span.data" variable - so I've either screwed up my knowledge of do loops or if statements)

data = []
page.agent.get(url)
page.search('div.row').each do |row_data|
 if (row_data.search('div.c1:contains("/SPECIFIC TEXT/")').text.strip
  temp = row_data.search('div.c2 span.data').text.strip
  data << temp
 end
end

Answer 1

I'd do

require 'nokogiri'

html = <<_
<div class="holder">
  <div class ="row">
   <div class="c1">
     <!-- Content I Don't need -->
   </div>
   <div class="c2">
    <span class="data">
     <!-- Content I Don't Need -->
    <span class="data">
   </div>
 </div>
 <div class="row">
  <div class="c1">
   SPECIFIC TEXT
  </div>
  <div class="c2">
   <span class="data">
    What I want
   </span>
  </div>
 </div>
</div>
_

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(html)
css_string = 'div.row > div.c1[text()*="SPECIFIC TEXT"] + div.c2 span.data'
doc.at(css_string).text.strip
# => "What I want"

How those selectors would work here -

• [name*="value"] - Selects elements that have the specified attribute with a value containing the a given substring.

• Child Selector (“parent > child”) - Selects all direct child elements specified by "child" of elements specified by "parent".

• Next Adjacent Selector (“prev + next”) - Selects all next elements matching "next" that are immediately preceded by a sibling "prev".

• Class Selector (“.class”) - Selects all elements with the given class.

• Descendant Selector (“ancestor descendant”) - Selects all elements that are descendants of a given ancestor.

Answer 2

There's no need to stop and insert ruby logic when you can extract what you need in a single CSS selector.

data = page.search('div.row > div.c1:contains("SPECIFIC TEXT") + div.c2 span.data')

This will include only those that match the selector (e.g. follow the SPECIFIC TEXT).

Here's where your logic may have gone wrong:

This code

if (row_data.search('div.c1:contains("SPECIFIC TEXT")'...
  temp = row_data.search('div.c2 span.data')...

first searches the row for the specific text, then if it matches, returns ALL rows matching the second query, which has the same starting point. The key is the + in the CSS selector above which will return elements immediately following (e.g. the next sibling element). I'm making an assumption, of course, that the next element is always what you want.