Convert HTML to Ruby Online

Paste a HTML table below, edit it if you need to, and get Ruby back. The conversion runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded, there is no size limit and there is no signup.

From

From a page

The only part of this site that uses a server. The address is sent to it so the page can be fetched, because a browser is not allowed to fetch someone else's page itself. Your own files are never involved.

Nothing here is uploaded. The parsing happens on this page.

Edit

Paste or upload something above and it will appear here.

ToDataMarkupDocumentsCodeSchemasImages

Header rowDetect numbers

The output will appear here once there is a table to convert.

What HTML is

An HTML table is a table element containing thead and tbody, with th cells for headers and td cells for data.

Web pages, email templates and anything pasted into a CMS.

What Ruby is

A Ruby array of hashes with symbol keys.

Rails seed files and Ruby scripts.

What changes when you convert HTML to Ruby

The first table in the markup is used. Cell contents are stripped of inline tags and entities are decoded, so <td><b>Total</b> </td> arrives as Total. Nested tables inside a cell are not descended into.

Column names are converted to valid symbol names, which means non-word characters become underscores.

What carries over from HTML to Ruby

HTML records 2 things about a table that Ruby has no way to hold.

Ruby wants a type for each column, and HTML does not record one, so each column is typed from what its values look like. A column of digits that should stay text - a zip code, a phone number, a leading-zero id - is the usual thing to check afterwards.

Ruby has no header row. The column names are repeated as keys on every record instead, which is why the result is bigger on disk than the table it came from.

Anything visual in the HTML - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in Ruby and is dropped. The values are what survives.

The identifier 007 comes out of the Ruby as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.

The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a Ruby file goes wrong.

The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the Ruby.

A worked example

Three rows of staff data, with an identifier that has a leading zero, a value containing a comma, a value containing quotes and one blank cell. Those are the four places formats disagree, so they are the four places to look.

HTML in

<table>
  <thead>
    <tr><th>id</th><th>name</th><th>role</th><th>started</th><th>hours</th></tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr><td>007</td><td>Halima Yusuf</td><td>Analyst, data</td><td>2024-03-15</td><td>38.5</td></tr>
    <tr><td>012</td><td>Jonah "Jo" Pryce</td><td>Engineer</td><td>2025-11-02</td><td></td></tr>
    <tr><td>104</td><td>Wei Chen</td><td>Manager</td><td>2023-06-30</td><td>40</td></tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

Ruby out

staff = [
  { id: '007', name: 'Halima Yusuf', role: 'Analyst, data', started: '2024-03-15', hours: '38.5' },
  { id: '012', name: 'Jonah "Jo" Pryce', role: 'Engineer', started: '2025-11-02', hours: '' },
  { id: '104', name: 'Wei Chen', role: 'Manager', started: '2023-06-30', hours: '40' },
]

Questions

How do I convert HTML to Ruby?

Paste your HTML into the box above or drop the file onto it. Check the table in the grid, then copy or download the Ruby from the output panel. It takes one step and the data never leaves your browser.

Is there a limit on file size?

No. The work happens on your own machine, so the limit is your machine's memory rather than an upload cap. A file with tens of thousands of rows converts in a second or two.

Is my data uploaded anywhere?

No. The parsing and generating are done by JavaScript running on this page. You can watch the network tab while you convert and see that nothing is sent.