Nokogiri is a popular open-source library in Ruby for parsing HTML and XML. It's often used for web scraping because it can easily navigate and manipulate the structure of web pages. Here are some resources for learning more about Nokogiri and web scraping in general:
Official Documentation
- Nokogiri Documentation: The official Nokogiri documentation is the best place to start. It provides installation instructions, tutorials, and method descriptions.
Online Tutorials and Articles
Ruby Guides: Offers a comprehensive guide on how to use Nokogiri for web scraping.
GoRails: Has screencasts about web scraping with Nokogiri and Ruby.
Medium & Dev.to: Articles by various authors on practical web scraping with Nokogiri.
Books
"The Ruby Way" by Hal Fulton: This book includes a section on processing XML and HTML that covers the basics of using Nokogiri.
- ISBN: 978-0321714633
"Programming Ruby" by Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, and Andy Hunt: Also known as the "Pickaxe" book, this comprehensive guide to Ruby contains information on working with data, which may include examples with Nokogiri.
- ISBN: 978-1937785499
Video Courses
- Udemy, Coursera, and other online learning platforms often have courses on Ruby that cover web scraping using Nokogiri. Search for Ruby courses that include web scraping modules.
Online Forums and Communities
Stack Overflow: A great place to ask specific questions about Nokogiri and web scraping and find answers to common issues.
Ruby on Rails Talk Mailing List: Discuss Ruby-related topics, including Nokogiri and web scraping.
Reddit: Subreddits like r/ruby can be a good place to ask questions and share experiences with Nokogiri.
GitHub and Open Source Projects
Nokogiri GitHub Repository: Browsing the source code and issues can provide insight into how the library works and its capabilities.
Open Source Projects: Look at open-source projects that use Nokogiri for web scraping to see how it's used in real-world applications.
Practice and Experimentation
Finally, the best way to learn web scraping with Nokogiri is to practice. Try writing scripts to scrape websites (always with permission and following the website's robots.txt guidelines) to extract data you're interested in.
Example Code Snippet in Ruby using Nokogiri
Here's a simple example of how to use Nokogiri to scrape a web page:
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'
# Open a web page
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(URI.open('https://example.com'))
# Search for nodes by css
doc.css('h1').each do |node|
puts node.text
end
Remember to respect the terms of service of the website you're scraping, and never scrape protected or sensitive data without permission.
