watir find "re td"

Let us assume that we are working with the table:

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>1a</td>
    <td>1b</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>2a</td>
    <td>2b</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Solution - Watir-Webdriver

The Table class has a strings method that returns the text of the table as a 2D array. The array is of rows, but you can use transpose to get it to be columns.

columns = browser.table(:id => "table").strings.transpose
p columns[0]
#=> ["1a", "2a"]
p columns[1]
#=> ["1b", "2b"]

Solution - Iteration

You can of course also iterate through each row and collect the cell in each column:

p browser.table(:id => "table").trs.collect{ |tr| tr[0].text }
#=> ["1a", "2a"]
p browser.table(:id => "table").trs.collect{ |tr| tr[1].text }