R – Editing Text in a Nokogiri Element or Using Regex

nokogiriregexruby

Is there a way to edit the text of a nokogiri element? I have a nokogiri element that contains a list element (<li>) and I would like to remove some characters from the text while preserving the <li> html. Specifically, I want to remove a leading ":" character in the text if it exists. It doesn't look like there's a text= method for nokogiri elements, but I just wanted to make sure.

Maybe I will have to use regular expressions? If so, how would I remove a leading ":" if it looks something like:

<li>: blah blah blah</li>

p.s. I am using ruby.

Best Answer

#!/usr/bin/ruby1.8

require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'

html = <<EOS
  <ul>
    <li>: blah blah blah</li>
    <li>: foo bar baz</li>
  </ul>
EOS

doc = Nokogiri::HTML.parse(html)
for li in doc.xpath('//li/text()')
  li.content = li.content.gsub(/^: */, '')
end
puts doc.to_html

# => <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
# => <html><body><ul>
# => <li>blah blah blah</li>
# =>     <li>foo bar baz</li>
# =>   </ul></body></html>
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