Find tag with id including [] with Nokogiri

Question

I have an html element like:

I want to search for this element by id, but it seems that nokogiri is getting confus

Answer 1

Chris, try this and let me know if it works:

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(page)
el = doc.xpath("//div[@id='spam[500]']").first

The problem is that you can't access it via CSS (even in the browser). Try setting some CSS attributes for "spam[500]" and they won't be applied. You can access via xpath however, as shown above.

Answer 2

The real problem here is that the characters [ and ] are illegal in an HTML4 (or XML) id attribute - look at the following:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-name

(for the normative definition of the id attribute look at www.w3.org//TR/html401/struct/global.html#adef-id)

Answer 3

you can also do it this way

el = doc.xpath("id(spam[500])").first

for elements having id's you can call them directly through id because its always unique.

for finding out xpaths, please add a 'xpath checker' plugin to firefox. It helps a lot and very easy