blogging and scraping

When we have the “include Watir”, then we cannot load another ruby file.

I spent more than 1 hour to figure out this.

Some times I need to check the amount of the links in a search list, at first I try and failed by:
ie.links(:id, /bra bra/).length

and then I find a solution by:
ie.div(:id, “searchList”).links

and then by googles, I find a better solution:
links_searchlist = ie101.links.find_all { |link| link.class_name == ‘permalink’ }
puts “the links in the searchlist:”
puts links_searchlist.length

and in another case, following code also works:
searchlistlinks = ie102.links.find_all { |link| link.id =~ /hitURL/ }
links_searchlist = searchlistlinks.length
puts links_searchlist

following can also work:
searchlistlinks = ie33.links.find_all { |link| link.href =~ /something/ }
but be careful that the following (url) will not work:
searchlistlinks = ie33.links.find_all { |link| link.url =~ /something/ }

Recently I found the best solution by google:
links = ie51.div(:id, ‘threadlist’).html.scan(/something/).count
puts links

I just put the names of the gems here for future reference:
hpricot
nokogiri
mechanize
webrat
scrubyt

I always googles when I encounter any problem related to watir, but after these years’ practice, I will state that the most useful site for watir is http://wtr.rubyforge.org/rdoc/, most answer is already there.

Several times I spend several hours to identify an element, the element is there, but watir can not find it.

I click a link and a new IE window comes up, and forget to attach the new IE window, so watir and me are looking for elements on different windows.

When debugging the scripts of the watir application, there may be a need to flash an element, following is the code:

ie.element_by_xpath(” “).flash