How to populate an array with text from html webscraping in ruby - html

Question

I have used the nokogiri ruby gem to webscrape an html file for only the text under the tableData class. The html code is setup like so:
<div class="table-wrap">
<table class="table">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td class="tableData"> Jane Doe</td>
<td class="tableData"> 01/01/2017</td>
<td class="tableData">01/09/2017 </td>
<td class="tableData">Vacation</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tableData">John Doe</td>
<td class="tableData"> 01/01/2017</td>
<td class="tableData">01/09/2017 </td>
<td class="tableData">Vacation</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
and the code I used to webscrape looks like this:
vt = page.css("td[class='tableData']").text
puts vt
Which gives this output:
Jane Doe 01/01/201701/09/2017 VacationJohn Doe 01/01/201701/09/2017 Vacation
I want to populate an array within an array with only the 4 text values pertaining to each person. Which should look like this:
[[Jane Doe, 01/01/2017, 01/09/2017, Vacation], [John Doe, 01/01/2017, 01/09/2017, Vacation]]
I am new to coding and I'm not sure how to create a for loop to iterate over either the html code itself or the vt variable to produce an array of arrays. I know there are some push statements involved following the for loop but its the actual structure of the for loop that I am having trouble putting together. If you could provide some explanation in your answer for how the for loop works in this situation it would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

This is the basic structure you need. map is needed :
html=%q(<div class="table-wrap">
<table class="table">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td class="tableData"> Jane Doe</td>
<td class="tableData"> 01/01/2017</td>
<td class="tableData">01/09/2017 </td>
<td class="tableData">Vacation</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tableData">John Doe</td>
<td class="tableData"> 01/01/2017</td>
<td class="tableData">01/09/2017 </td>
<td class="tableData">Vacation</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>)
require 'nokogiri'
doc = Nokogiri::XML(html)
array = doc.xpath('//tr').map do |tr|
tr.xpath('td').map{ |td| td.text }
end
p array
# [[" Jane Doe", " 01/01/2017", "01/09/2017 ", "Vacation"], ["John Doe", " 01/01/2017", "01/09/2017 ", "Vacation"]]

Answer 2

Try parsing the snippet as XML, finding all "tr" elements via XPath, and collecting their "td//text()" children:
require 'nokogiri'
doc = Nokogiri::XML(get_html_snippet)
data = doc.xpath('//tr').map do |tr|
tr.xpath('td').map { |td| td.text.strip }
end
data # => [["Jane Doe", "01/01/2017", "01/09/2017", "Vacation"], ["John Doe", "01/01/2017", "01/09/2017", "Vacation"]]