Thanks for the comment.

They syntax is a little funky for sure, but it is valid syntax. I used an XML parser library called Hpricot for this example. Hpricot takes a block of XML and allows you to parse out individual elements by referencing their Xpath. For the example you gave above if the XML looked like this:

<property>
<mls>1234</mls>
<list_price>123123</list_price>
</property>

You could pass that block of XML to Hpricot and access the different elements using the following syntax:

@mls = (property/:mls).inner_html
@list_price = (property/:list_price).inner_html

As far as the errors are concerned a lot has happened since I last used this script. For one, ruby gems are no longer hosted on github so my customized jspradlin-scrubyt gem may no longer be available.

Anyway, I do most of my screen scraping using a library called Nokogiri. I’d check that library out. I find the syntax a little more intuitive.

I’m a bit of a Ruby newbie and just had a few questions.

I’ve never see the syntax you use in your initialize function

def initialize(property)
@mls = (property/:mls).inner_html
@list_price = (property/:list_price).inner_html

I’ve never see that (var/:symbol) syntax. Is that just a typo? What does the /: mean when in parenthesis?

Also, I’ve tried running this example, and after fixing up a lot of versioning errors with the dependencies, I get a ’scan’, ran out of buffer space error… has this happened to you?

Thanks!