How to pass in variable to string with nested quotes - Ruby

Question

I have this array of team names:

teams = ["Atlanta Hawks","Boston Celtics","Brooklyn Nets"]

I want to iterate over teams array, and insert each team into the css selector for 'title':

teams.each do |team_name|
    basketball_team_links << basketball_teams.css("a[class='lnkBeatWriterLeague'][title=#{team_name}]").map { |link| link['href'] }
end

Obviously my approach is flawed, and I can't figure out how to read in the |team_name| variable.

Community · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-20 09:12:55Z

4

have you tried with:

"a[class='lnkBeatWriterLeague'][title='#{team_name}']"

or:

"a[class='lnkBeatWriterLeague'][title=\"#{team_name}\"]"

or:

%Q{a[class='lnkBeatWriterLeague'][title="#{team_name}"]}

or:

"a[class='lnkBeatWriterLeague'][title='" + team_name + "']"

EDIT:

Adding a note on some corner cases that should be considered, as suggested by @Amadan in the comments.

Whether the teams strings come from a user or not, you might have apostrophes and quotes in them.
There are two simple ways to correctly escape them:

require 'cgi'
CGI.escapeHTML "input string"

require 'json'
"input string".to_json

edited Jun 20, 2020 at 9:12

CommunityBot

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answered Jun 5, 2015 at 1:13

tompave

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2 Comments

Nic Stelter Over a year ago

Thank you, as I'm sure you are aware...they all worked.

Amadan Over a year ago

Caveat: each of them will break under certain circumstances: O'Reilly's Team, Sadist\"User, Jackie "Slugger" Jameson. Escape your team_name using CGI.escapeHTML, use team_name.to_json to also get quotes (requiring cgi and json, respectively), or just gsub your string into submission to be on the safe side. "Psh, I'll never have apostrophes in my string" will bite you almost every time. :) (Of course, you should choose inner quotes to match the escaping method you employ)

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