Hpricot is certainly much more than that. In fact, Hpricot is A Fast, Enjoyable HTML Parser for Ruby. Even though the possibilities are limited by one’s imagination, I find testing websites with Hpricot particularly breezy:

require 'rubygems'
require 'hpricot'
require 'open-uri'
require 'test/unit'

class GoogleTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  def setup
    @base = 'http://google.com'
  end

  def test_language_tools_title
    page = click_link('Language Tools')
    assert_equal('Language Tools', page.at('title').inner_html)
  end

  private

  def click_link(link)
    doc = Hpricot(open(@base))
    link = (doc/'a').detect { |e| e.inner_html == link }
    Hpricot(open("#{@base}#{link[:href]}"))
  end
end

Add the flexibility of the Ruby Net::HTTP API to the mix – for submitting forms, authentication, accessing resources behind proxies, etc, stir and serve chilled.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 8:14 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.