How do I pretty-print HTML with Nokogiri?

Question

I wrote a web crawler in Ruby and I\'m using Nokogiri::HTML to parse the page. I need to print the page out and while messing around in IRB I noticed a pr

Answer 1

My solution was to add a print method onto the actual Nokogiri objects. After you run the code in the snippet below, you should just be able to write node.print, and it'll pretty print the contents. No xslt required :-)

Nokogiri::XML::Node.class_eval do
  # Print every Node by default (will be overridden by CharacterData)
  define_method :should_print? do
    true
  end

  # Duplicate this node, replace the contents of the duplicated node with a
  # newline. With this content substitution, the #to_s method conveniently
  # returns a string with the opening tag (e.g. `<a href="foo">`) on the first
  # line and the closing tag on the second (e.g. `</a>`, provided that the
  # current node is not a self-closing tag).
  #
  # Now, print the open tag preceded by the correct amount of indentation, then
  # recursively print this node's children (with extra indentation), and then
  # print the close tag (if there is a closing tag)
  define_method :print do |indent=0|
    duplicate = self.dup
    duplicate.content = "\n"
    open_tag, close_tag = duplicate.to_s.split("\n")

    puts (" " * indent) + open_tag
    self.children.select(&:should_print?).each { |child| child.print(indent + 2) }
    puts (" " * indent) + close_tag if close_tag
  end
end

Nokogiri::XML::CharacterData.class_eval do
  # Only print CharacterData if there's non-whitespace content
  define_method :should_print? do
    content =~ /\S+/
  end

  # Replace all consecutive whitespace characters by a single space; precede the
  # outut by a certain amount of indentation; print this text.
  define_method :print do |indent=0|
    puts (" " * indent) + to_s.strip.sub(/\s+/, ' ')
  end
end