Asp Forum - hrpicot - cant extract what i want from page

Adam Akhtar

3/28/2008 7:11:00 AM

Hi im starting to use hrpicot and im having problems extracting
descriptions of various concert events from a page. Here is a sample of
the html


<a name="concerts"/>
Concerts
 
POPULAR
 
 
Middle Field! Vol.4
 
Featuring electric-pop band The Stealth, Mac and Masaru, and others. Mar
28, 7pm, Â¥2,500 (adv)/ Â¥3,000 (door). Shibuya O-Nest. Tel: 03-3498-9999.
 
 
Philip Woo featuring Brenda Vaughn
 
Japanese pianist and soul singer performing with Andy Wulf and Kaori
Kobayashi. Mar 28 & 29, 7 & 9:30pm, Â¥3,150. Cotton Club, Marunouchi.
Tel: 03-3215-1555.
 
...
...
...
etc

I can get the artist band names fine using
names = doc.search("//span[@class='textbold']")

but i cant get teh descriptions. In fact the descriptions aren't
indvidually wrapped up in any tags but rather just clumped together
under the paragraph tab with line breaks 

So I thought id just try
descriptions =
doc.search("/html/body/div/table/tbody/tr[4]/td/table/tbody/tr/td[2]/table/tbody/tr/td/span/p")
but when i try to puts descriptions nothing is printed to the screen.

How would i go about getting this info??? any tips or ideas?

Thanks
--
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4 Answers

Adam Akhtar

3/28/2008 9:11:00 AM

more info..

the original website can be found at
http://metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/recent/li...

i used firebug to retrieve the xpath address of the desired paragraph
(excerpted above). When I put it in doc.search it doesnt retrieve
anything, nothing at all????

Does anyone know why i cant????? Im banging my head against the wall
--
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Todd Benson

3/28/2008 9:35:00 AM

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 2:11 AM, Adam Akhtar <adamtemporary@gmail.com> wrot=
e:
> Hi im starting to use hrpicot and im having problems extracting
> descriptions of various concert events from a page. Here is a sample of
> the html
>
>
> 
> <a name=3D"concerts"/>
> Concerts
> 
> POPULAR
> 
> 
> Middle Field! Vol.4
> 
> Featuring electric-pop band The Stealth, Mac and Masaru, and others. Mar
> 28, 7pm, =A52,500 (adv)/ =A53,000 (door). Shibuya O-Nest. Tel: 03-3498-9=
999.
> 
> 
> Philip Woo featuring Brenda Vaughn
> 
> Japanese pianist and soul singer performing with Andy Wulf and Kaori
> Kobayashi. Mar 28 & 29, 7 & 9:30pm, =A53,150. Cotton Club, Marunouchi.
> Tel: 03-3215-1555.
> 
> ...
> ...
> ...
> etc
>
> I can get the artist band names fine using
> names =3D doc.search("//span[@class=3D'textbold']")
>
> but i cant get teh descriptions. In fact the descriptions aren't
> indvidually wrapped up in any tags but rather just clumped together
> under the paragraph tab with line breaks 
>
> So I thought id just try
> descriptions =3D
> doc.search("/html/body/div/table/tbody/tr[4]/td/table/tbody/tr/td[2]/tab=
le/tbody/tr/td/span/p")
> but when i try to puts descriptions nothing is printed to the screen.
>
> How would i go about getting this info??? any tips or ideas?
>
> Thanks

Wow! It looks nice, but the html is really ugly. This would be
pretty hard to scrape on a regular basis. For artists, there are a
mix of tags, tags,
and I noticed one artist with no surrounding tags at all (Ex-press
Ver.2).

It can be really hard to work with inconsistent html, but I suppose it
could be done to some degree of accuracy. Any hpricot masters out
there? I'm sure you'd have to attack with regexps as well. Maybe
turning into text and then parsing is a better idea after all.

Todd

Adam Akhtar

3/28/2008 10:06:00 AM

thanks tod for the reply. Yes even I thought that it was badly designed
and I dont have any web desing experience at all. In fact i learn the
basics of html, xml and xpath just for this.

Although those inconsitencies will prove to be a problem in the future
the one im having right now is getting any information at all. Surely
when i pass the xpath address for the paragraph element which contains
all the artists names and event descriptinos it should return something
rather than nothing. Is that right??? Every time a try to print to
screen the result of the search it just comes blank. Does anyone know
why???

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-....

daniel hoey

3/31/2008 12:20:00 AM

On Mar 28, 6:11 pm, Adam Akhtar <adamtempor...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi im starting to use hrpicot and im having problems extracting
> descriptions of various concert events from a page. Here is a sample of
> the html
>
> 
> <a name="concerts"/>
> Concerts
> 
> POPULAR
> 
> 
> Middle Field! Vol.4
> 
> Featuring electric-pop band The Stealth, Mac and Masaru, and others. Mar
> 28, 7pm, ¥2,500 (adv)/ ¥3,000 (door). Shibuya O-Nest. Tel: 03-3498-9999.
> 
> 
> Philip Woo featuring Brenda Vaughn
> 
> Japanese pianist and soul singer performing with Andy Wulf and Kaori
> Kobayashi. Mar 28 & 29, 7 & 9:30pm, ¥3,150. Cotton Club, Marunouchi.
> Tel: 03-3215-1555.
> 
> ..
> ..
> ..
> etc
>
> I can get the artist band names fine using
> names = doc.search("//span[@class='textbold']")
>
> but i cant get teh descriptions. In fact the descriptions aren't
> indvidually wrapped up in any tags but rather just clumped together
> under the paragraph tab with line breaks 
>
> So I thought id just try
> descriptions =
> doc.search("/html/body/div/table/tbody/tr[4]/td/table/tbody/tr/td[2]/table/tbody/tr/td/span/p")
> but when i try to puts descriptions nothing is printed to the screen.
>
> How would i go about getting this info??? any tips or ideas?
>
> Thanks
> --
> Posted viahttp://www.ruby-....

Once you have the 'name' node you can use next_node to get the next
elements in the document
This method should work for your example:

def print_names_and_descriptions(hpricot_doc)
names = hpricot_doc.search("//span[@class='textbold']")

names.each do |name|
node = name.next_node
node = node.next_node until node.text? and node.inner_text =~ /\w
+/

puts name.inner_text
puts node.to_s.strip
puts
end
end

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hrpicot - cant extract what i want from page

Adam Akhtar

Adam Akhtar

Todd Benson

Adam Akhtar

daniel hoey

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