In watir, is there a way to capture the text matched by .present?

Question

It is possible to only get the text that was matched by a call to .present?

The specific issue was that the page contains a string of the form "TIME: ##:##" where # is [0-9]. I'm interested in the value of ##:##

I can solve the specific problem with something like (hopefully no typos)

myString = "TIME: [0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]"
myRegExp = /#{myString.gsub(/\s/, '\s')}/
if ( @browser.div(:text => myRegExp).present? )
    myResult = @browser.div(:text => myRegExp).text
end

In my test, myResult is a string containing all of the text elements on the page; which is more information than I want. I want "TIME: ##:##"

Of course, I can use Ruby to get what I want

myResult [ myRegExp ]

The specific issue is solved. The more general question is more of a best practices question. Is there a better way? Is there a way to get Watir to return just the part of the string that matched or is using the Ruby string class the best way to solve this sort of problem?

Answer 1

I tend to use Ruby to do any/all of the 'extra' stuff I want out of my tests. In terms of 'Best Practices' I would say just use 'Watir' for 'driving' the browser test. so in you particular case. I would save the full string then parse it later into the format you want.