Scraping for a specific title using Nokogiri in Ruby - html

Question

I'm currently practicing web scraping using the NYT Best Sellers website. I want to get the title of the #1 book on the list and found the HTML element:
<div class="book-body">
<p class="freshness">12 weeks on the list</p>
<h3 class="title" itemprop="name">CRAZY RICH ASIANS</h3>
<p class="author" itemprop="author">by Kevin Kwan</p>
<p itemprop="description" class="description">A New Yorker gets a surprise when she spends the summer with her boyfriend in Singapore.</p>
</div>
I'm using the following code to grab the specific text:
doc.css(".title").text
However, it returns the titles of every book on the list. How would I go about getting just the specific book title, "CRAZY RICH ASIANS"?

Answer 1

If you look at the return from doc.css(".title") you will see it is a collection of all the titles. As Nokogiri::XML::Element Objects
CSS to my knowledge does not have a selector for targeting the first element of a given class. (Someone may certainly correct me if I am wrong) but to get just the first element from a Nokogiri::XML::NodeSet is still very simple as it acts like an Array in many cases. For Example:
doc.css(".title")[0].text
You could also use xpath to select just the first one (since XPath does support index based selection) like so:
doc.xpath(doc.xpath("(//h3[#class='title'])[1]").text
Please Note:
Ruby indexes start at 0 as in the first example;
XPath indexes start at 1 as in the second example.