Nokogiri text node contents

Question

Is there any clean way to get the contents of text nodes with Nokogiri? Right now I\'m using

some_node.at_xpath( \"//whatever\" ).first.content

Answer 1

Just look for text nodes:

require 'nokogiri'

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(<

This is a text node 
 This is another text node


EOT

doc.search('//text()').each do |t|
  t.replace(t.content.strip)
end

puts doc.to_html

Which outputs:

This is a text node
This is another text node

BTW, your code example doesn't work. at_xpath( "//whatever" ).first is redundant and will fail. at_xpath will find only the first occurrence, returning a Node. first is superfluous at that point, if it would work, but it won't because Node doesn't have a first method.

---

I have bar, how I get at the "bar" text without doing doc.xpath_at( "//data/foo" ).children.first.content?

Assuming doc contains the parsed DOM:

doc.to_xml # => "\n\n  bar\n\n"

Get the first occurrence:

doc.at('foo').text       # => "bar"
doc.at('//foo').text     # => "bar"
doc.at('/data/foo').text # => "bar"

Get all occurrences and take the first one:

doc.search('foo').first.text      # => "bar"
doc.search('//foo').first.text    # => "bar"
doc.search('data foo').first.text # => "bar"