How to get the raw HTML source code for a page by using Ruby or Nokogiri?

Question

I'm using Nokogiri (Ruby Xpath library) to grep contents on web pages. Then I found problems with some web pages, such as Ajax web pages, and that means when I view source code I won't be seeing the exact contents such as <table>, etc.

How can I get the HTML code for the actual content?

Answer 1

Don't use Nokogiri at all if you want the raw source of a web page. Just fetch the web page directly as a string, and then do not feed that to Nokogiri. For example:

require 'open-uri'
html = open('http://phrogz.net').read
puts html.length #=> 8461
puts html        #=> ...raw source of the page...

If, on the other hand, you want the post-JavaScript-modified contents of a page (such as an AJAX library that executes JavaScript code to fetch new content and change the page), then you can't use Nokogiri. You need to use Ruby to control a web browser (e.g. read up on Selenium or Watir).