I've been very happy to be able to start migrating from Incanica's ITP
to Watir at work, but I've run into my first real problem. I have a
select box defined thus:

and I'm trying to choose the ">=" option via the following code:

  $ie.selectBox( :name, "op_numhits" ).select( ">=" )

(Aside: actually, what I write to define the task is XML adapted from ITP's syntax, e.g.,

  <browser_action entity="selectBox" entity_id_type="name" entity_id_value="op_numhits" action="select" param="&gt;=" />

and our WebSiteTester Ruby class translates that into Watir calls.)

and the output I get from Watir is:

Setting box op_numhits to >= String
comparing >= to á=áá
comparing >= to á<>á
comparing >= to á>=á
comparing >= to á<=á

While I just realized I could enhance our WebSiteTester class to be able to pass Regexp's as well as Strings to the select() method, it would also be nice to be able to specify the desired select option by value (in my example, the value is "3").

Is it even possible for Watir to select something based on an attribute
that's empty, like the first option of the select box below? I know I
also have an issue given that I'm translating from an XML representation
to a Ruby Watir call, and I'm probably getting a nil back from REXML
when I ask for the value of an attribute that has nothing between the
quotes....