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rubyregexhtml-parsing

How to use a regex search phrase in HTTP response body

I am trying to search for a phrase like this in HTTP response body:

>> myvar1
<HTML>
<HEAD> <TITLE>TestExample [Date]</TITLE></HEAD>
</HTML>

When I do this, I do not get any result:

>> myvar.scan(/<HEAD> <TITLE>TestExample [Date]<\/TITLE><\/HEAD>/)
[]

Here, [Date] is a dynamic variable that gets its value via loop iteration.

What should I add/change in the regex?

I am using Nokogiri to scan for keyword in HTTP response body.

Solution

  • Please do not parse any markup like HTML with regular expressions. For such purposes it is much more maintainable to feed it into a proper SAX or DOM parser and just extract what you want that way. The reason for this is that no matter how clever you formulate your regex, there will always be corner cases you probably forgot.

    require 'nokogiri'

response = "<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>TestExample [Date]</TITLE></HEAD> </HTML>"
doc = Nokogiri::HTML( response )


doc.css( "title" ).text