Hpricot remove single element

Question

I'm using Ruby's Hpricot gem to parse html. I'd like to remove a single node from the document for use elsewhere, but I can't find a way.

I see that I can remove an entire list of elements, using an instance of Hpricot::Elements (x = (doc/"div").remove), but I only want to remove the first instance of a given tag.

Poking around, I see the suggestion that I simply replace the element's inner text with a comment node or whitespace (x.inner_html = ''), but that prevents me making use of the node elsewhere.

What can I do?

Specs: Ruby 1.8.7, Hpricot 0.8.4

Answer 1

Try this!

x = (doc/"div").first
x.parent.children.delete(x) unless x.nil?