Using Mechanize gem to return a collection of links based on their position in the DOM
mechanize, nokogiri, ruby
Solution
Part II The value you pass to :href has to be an exact match by default. So the href in your example would only match `<a href="/something"></a>` and not `<a href="foo.com/something/a"></a>`
What you want to do is to pass in a regex so that it will match a substring within the href field. Like so:
page = agent.get('http://foo.com/').links_with(:href => %r{/something/})
edit: Part I In order to get it to select links only in a link, add a nokogiri-style search method into your string. Like this:
page = agent.get('http://foo.com/').search("div#content").links_with(:href => %r{/something/}) # **
Ok, that doesn't work because after you do `page = agent.get('http://foo.com/').search("div#content")` you get a Nokogiri object back instead of a mechanize one, so links_with won't work. However you will be able to extract the links from the Nokogiri object using the css method. I would suggest something like:
`page = agent.get('http://foo.com/').search("div#content").css("a")`
If that doesn't work, I'd suggest checking out http://nokogiri.org/tutorials
Problem
I am struggling with mechanize. I wish to "click" on a set of links which can only be identified by their position (all links within div#content) or their href. I have tried both of these identification methods above without success. From the documentation, I could not figure out how return a collection of links (for clicking) based on their position in the DOM, and not by attributes directly on the link. Secondly, the documentation suggested you can you use :href to match a partial href, ``` page = agent.get('http://foo.com/').links_with(:href => "/something") ``` but the only way I can get it to return a link is by passing a fully qualified URL, e.g ``` page = agent.get('http://foo.com/').links_with(:href => "http://foo.com/something/a") ``` This is not very usefull if i want to return a collection of links with href's ``` http://foo.com/something/a http://foo.com/something/b http://foo.com/something/c etc... ``` Am I doing something wrong? do I have unrealistic expectations?