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rubyxpathnokogirimechanizemechanize-ruby

click on xpath link with Mechanize

I want to click a link with Mechanize that I select with xpath (nokogiri).

How is that possible?

    next_page = page.search "//div[@class='grid-dataset-pager']/span[@class='currentPage']/following-sibling::a[starts-with(@class, 'page')][1]"
    next_page.click

The problem is that nokogiri element doesn't have click function.

I can't read the href (URL) and send get request because the link has onclick function defined (no href attribute).

If that's not possible, what are the alternatives?

Solution

    1. Use page.at instead of page.search when you're trying to find only one element.

    2. You can make your selector simpler (shorter) by using CSS selector syntax:

      next_page = page.at('div.grid-dataset-pager > span.currentPage + a[class^="page"]')

    3. You can construct your own Link instance if you have the Nokogiri element, page, and mechanize object to feed the constructor:

      next_link = Mechanize::Page::Link.new( next_page, mech, page )
next_link.click

    4. However, you might not need that, because Mechanize#click lets you supply a string with the text of the anchor/button to click on.

      # Assuming this link text is unique on the page, which I suspect it is
mech.click next_page.text

    5. Edit after re-reading the question completely: However, none of this is going to help you, because Mechanize is not a web browser! It does not have a JavaScript engine, and thus won't (can't) execute your onclick for you. For this you'll need to use Ruby to control a real web browser, e.g. using Watir or Selenium or Celerity or the like.