stumped on clicking a link with nokogiri and mechanize

Question

perhaps im doing it wrong, or there's another more efficient way. Here is my problem:

I first, using nokogiri open an html document and use its css to traverse the document until i find the link which i need to click.

Now once i have the link, how do i use mechanize to click it? According to the documentation, the object returned by Mechanize.new either the string or a Mechanize::Page::Link object.

I cannot use string - since there could be 100's of the same link - i only want mechanize to click the link that was traversed by nokogiri.

Any idea?

Electrotechnics

Answer 1

After you have found the link node you need, you can create the Mechanize::Page::Link object manually, and click it afterwards:

agent = Mechanize.new
page = agent.get "http://google.com"
node = page.search ".//p[@class='posted']"
Mechanize::Page::Link.new(node, agent, page).click

Haydenhaydn

That is not the best way to go. Take a look at my answer. – Asuncion

I think this one is better in some cases, even if not the easiest. There were many many links with the same class in the page, but I needed to know which one I was clicking relative to the table cell it was in relative to another table cell. So I can user Nokorigi to find that cell and then the link within it. I can't do that with Mechanize link_with for what I have seen. – Hemeralopia

Answer 2

Easier way than @binarycode option:

agent = Mechanize.new
page = agent.get "http://google.com"
page.link_with(:class => 'posted').click

Asuncion

Your approach is best when the conditions that are used to find the link are very simple. Here the question poster uses nokogiri to traverse the document, so i provided solution where he could use nokogiri features, so more complex logic for finding the correct link could be implemented. – Haydenhaydn

The only limitation then is that the node must respond to .href or ['href'] or ['src'] – Asuncion

Answer 3

That is simple, you don't need to use mechanize link_with().click

You can just getthe link and update your page variable

Mechanize saves current working site internally, so it is smart enough to follow local links

Ex.:

agent = Mechanize.new
page = agent.get "http://somesite.com"

next_page_link =  page.search('your exotic selectors here').first rescue nil  #nokogyri object 
next_page_href =  next_page_link['href'] rescue nil  # '/local/link/file.html'

page = agent.get(next_page_href) if next_page_href  # goes to 'http://somesite.com/local/link/file.html'

Wiggly