Nokogiri - parse HTML, match xpath, use different encoding

Set Proxy and timout interval

I'm using the read method because I don't need to send request over and over to try different encodings

require 'open-uri'    
html_data = open(url, :proxy => PROXY, :read_timeout => REQUEST_TIMEOUT).read rescue ''

Set The Encoding

requrie 'nokogiri'
ENCODING =  'WINDOWS-1251' # 'UTF-8'
html = Nokogiri::HTML(html_data, nil,ENCODING)

Try different encoding

match = html.xpath(SOME_XPATH) rescue []
if match.empty?
   html = Nokogiri::HTML(html_data, nil, 'UTF-8')
   #using .css is more awesome
   match = html.xpath(SOME_XPATH) rescue []
end

Get HTML from RSS

rss = Nokogiri::XML(open(RSS_URL, :proxy => PROXY))
nodes = rss.search('item/link')
nodes.each do |node|
   html_data = open(node.inner_text, :proxy => PROXY).read 
end

Rescue Timout errors

begin
   news_html = Nokogiri::HTML(html_data, nil, 'WINDOWS-1251')
rescue Timeout::Error => e
   html = Nokogiri::HTML::Document.new('')
end