How to prevent Nokogiri from adding tags?

Question

I noticed something strange using Nokogiri recently. All of the HTML I had been parsing had been given start and end and

Answer 1

The problem occurs because you're using the wrong method in Nokogiri to parse your content.

require 'nokogiri'

doc = Nokogiri::HTML('
foobar
')
puts doc.to_html
# >> 
# >> 
foobar

Rather than using HTML which results in a complete document, use HTML.fragment, which tells Nokogiri you only want the fragment parsed:

doc = Nokogiri::HTML.fragment('
foobar
')
puts doc.to_html
# >> 
foobar