Traversing Hpricot::Text object

[jmilarsky]

Is there a way to convert an Hpricot::Text object to an Elem or Elements object easily?

I need to parse some fairly ugly html (and yes, I did create my original Doc object using fixedup_tags => as an option), and I've pared it down to one giant Hpricot::Text object, which, in its string form, is 700-plus lines.

There are *clearly* html tags within this object, but obj.search('a') (as an example) yields nothing, and the generic

obj.search()

returns the entire object. I've even tried calling new_data = Hpricot(obj) and am still left with what seems to be an untraversible string.

For background, I am using Hpricot 0.7 (downloaded via gem) on Mac OSX Leopard.

Thanks in advance for any helpful suggestions and please let me know if I can further clarify my question.