Most people get very confused when they try to learn Nokogiri without mastering some fundamentals first. There is a reason for this. Trying to learn Nokogiri without learning the things that make it work is like trying to learn the features of Word without knowing how to type. By the end of this article, you'll be comfortable with taking a web site and extracting any piece of data from it.
Nokogiri is one of the most popular Ruby gems, with over 37 million downloads at publication time . Just as a comparison, Rails has 47 million downloads currently. My first thought after seeing this was: "Wow, if this gem is so popular, there must be some pretty comprehensive tutorials for it, right?" If you type "rails tutorial" into Google, you'll get over 280,000 results. A search for "nokogiri tutorial" gives you...less than 3000 results (on the bright side, this number should get bigger after this article is released!).
Continue reading %Nokogiri Fundamentals: Extract HTML from the Web%