I am trying to analyze an HTML document to determine the elements that are the visually widest elements. I want to visit each node on the page and determine its width, using the element_coordinates method. The method takes a css selector as an argument. So I'm looking for a way to generate css selectors for each node, similar to the way the developer tools in browser's do that.

First question is, can this be done through Mechanize::Chome over port 9222? I'm guessing I would need to learn how to send queries directly through the $mech object over the transport layer. If this is possible, any details would be appreciated.

If that won't work, how can I generate a unique css selector for each node. My initial thought process was:

  1. Take the HTML content and throw it into a tree.
  2. Recurse over the tree and generate an XML element for each node in the tree.
  3. Use the xml elements to construct a unique xpath for each node (I'm not sure how to do this)
  4. Finally, convert each xpath to a selector. I'm not sure how to do this either.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

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In reply to How to process each node in an HTML page by nysus

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