Missing Characters

Ryan

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Nov 4, 2020, 6:38:59 PM11/4/20

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I have a <td> element that I'm trying to pull an address from. The address is formatted like "123 Fake St.<br>City, State 65432" but when I use the nokogiri.css().text method I get back "123 Fake St.City, State 65432" without the <br>.

Why doesn't text return tags? Should I be using a different parsing strategy or passing another argument to get the full cell data or something?

Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide.

Walter Lee Davis

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Nov 4, 2020, 10:26:20 PM11/4/20

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If you want the entire HTML content of the element, you need to use the inner_html method. text returns just the textual content, as you've seen, by design.

Walter

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Mike Dalessio

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Nov 5, 2020, 6:40:56 AM11/5/20

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Here's a demonstration of the methods you can use to serialize a document node in a few different ways:

#! /usr/bin/env ruby

require "nokogiri"

html = <<~EOF
<html>
<body>
<div>123 Fake St.<br>City, State 65432</div>
</body>
</html>
EOF

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(html)

address = doc.at_css("div")

address.inspect # => "#<Nokogiri::XML::Element:0x78 name=\"div\" children=[#<Nokogiri::XML::Text:0x3c \"123 Fake St.\">, #<Nokogiri::XML::Element:0x50 name=\"br\">, #<Nokogiri::XML::Text:0x64 \"City, State 65432\">]>"

address.content # => "123 Fake St.City, State 65432"
address.text # => "123 Fake St.City, State 65432"
address.inner_text # => "123 Fake St.City, State 65432"

address.to_s # => "<div>123 Fake St.<br>City, State 65432</div>"
address.to_html # => "<div>123 Fake St.<br>City, State 65432</div>"
address.to_xml # => "<div>123 Fake St.<br/>City, State 65432</div>"
address.to_xhtml # => "<div>123 Fake St.<br />City, State 65432</div>"

address.inner_html # => "123 Fake St.<br>City, State 65432"

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Ryan Faegre

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Nov 5, 2020, 1:12:43 PM11/5/20

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Thank you so much! Just what I needed!

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