The following Xpath executed in Chrome's web inspector returns the expected number, 13, of nodes
//*[#id="day1"]//span[contains(#class, 'day-time-clock')]
However, when I add text() to it:
//*[#id="day1"]//span[contains(#class, 'day-time-clock')]/text()
it returns 26 nodes. However, only every other hit actually points somewhere in the source code, the others are just "numb".
The end node looks like this
<span class="medium bold day-time-clock">
09:00
<div class="tooltip-box first-free-tip ">
<div class="tooltip-box-inner">
<span class="fa fa-clock-o"></span>
Some text
</div>
</div>
</span>
The code sample above doesn't show exactly how it looks in the web inspector, there are a couple of empty rows in the text of this node. Here is a small screenshot of how it really looks.
Why is this happening? And what can I do about it?
Your span elements have multiple text node children. Some of the text node children contain only whitespace. In your example, the outer span element has one text node child containing "....09:00...." where "...." represents whitespace, plus one text node child immediately following the child div element. (Incidentally, my HTML is rusty, but I didn't think that having a div inside a span was allowed.)
Your second (inner) span element contains no text nodes, so /text() on this should select nothing.
Generally, using /text() in XPath is a bad idea unless you have some very good reason and know exactly what you are doing.
Related
Given this page snippet
<section id="mysection">
<div>
<div>
<div>
<a href="">
<div>first</div>
</a>
</div>
<div>
<a href="">
<div>second</div>
</a>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</section>
I want to access the second a-element using relative Xpath. In FF (and locating with Selenium IDE) this
//section[#id='mysection']//a[1]
works but this does not match
//section[#id='mysection']//a[2]
What is wrong with the second expression?
EDIT: Actually I do not care so much about Selenium IDE (just use it for quick verification). I want to get it going with selenium2library in Robot Framework. Here, the output is:
ValueError: Element locator with prefix '(//section[#id' is not
supported
for the suggested solution (//section[#id='mysection']//a)[2]
You can use this. This would select the anchor descendants of section and get you the second node. This works with xslt processor, hope this works with Selenium
//section[#id='mysection']/descendant::a[2]
Try this way instead :
(//section[#id='mysection']//a)[2]
//a[2] looks for <a> element within the same parent. Since each parent <div> only contains one <a> child, your xpath didn't match anything.
With this:
//section[#id='mysection']//a[1]
you are matching all first 'a' elements within any context (inside one div, for example), but with this
//section[#id='mysection']//a[2]
you are trying to match any second 'a' element with any context, but you dont have more than one 'a' element in any of nodes.
The icrementing sibling node thus should be a parent div node to those 'a' tags.
Very simple:
//section[#id='mysection']//a[1] - both elements
This is why previous answer with paranthesis around the whole thing is correct.
//section[#id='mysection']//div[1]/a - only first element
//section[#id='mysection']//div[2]/a - only second elemnt
Other way to mach each 'a' separately:
//section[#id='mysection']//a[div[text()='first']]
//section[#id='mysection']//a[div[text()='second']]
Other ways to reach to the second a-element can be by using the
<div>second</div>, call this bottom-up approach
instead of starting from section-element
<section id="mysection">, call this top-down approach
Using the div child of a-element, the solutions should look like this:
//div[.='second']/..
I have this html snippet
<div id="overview">
<strong>some text</strong>
<br/>
some other text
<strong>more text</strong>
TEXT I NEED IS HERE
<div id="sub">...</div>
</div>
How can I get the text I am looking for (shown in caps)?
I tried this, I get an error message saying not able to locate the element.
"//div[#id='overview']/strong[position()=2]/following-sibling"
I tried this, I get the div with id=sub, but not the text (correctly so)
"//div[#id='overview']/*[preceding-sibling::strong[position()=2]]"
Is there anyway to get the text, other than doing some string matching or regex with contents of overview div?
Thanks.
following-sibling is the axis, you still need to specify the actual node (in your example the XPath processor is searching for an element named following-sibling). You separate the axis from the node with ::.
Try this:
//div[#id='overview']/strong[position()=2]/following-sibling::text()[1]
This specifies the first text node after the second strong in the div.
If you always want the text immediately preceding the <div id="sub"> then you could try
//div[#id='sub']/preceding-sibling::text()[1]
That would give you everything between the </strong> and the opening <div ..., i.e. the upper case text plus its leading and trailing new lines and whitespace.
I use Nokogiri for parse the html page with same content:
<p class="parent">
Useful text
<br>
<span class="child">Useless text</span>
</p>
When I call the method page.css('p.parent').text Nokogiri returns 'Useful text Useless text'. But I need only 'Useful text'.
How to get node text without children?
XPath includes the text() node test for selecting text nodes, so you could do:
page.xpath('//p[#class="parent"]/text()')
Using XPath to select HTML classes can become quite tricky if the element in question could belong to more than one class, so this might not be ideal.
Fortunately Nokogiri adds the text() selector to CSS, so you can use:
page.css('p.parent > text()')
to get the text nodes that are direct children of p.parent. This will also return some nodes that are whtespace only, so you may have to filter them out.
You should be able to use page.css('p.parent').children.remove.
Then your page.css('p.parent').text will return the text without the children nodes.
Note: the page will be modified by the remove
i need to scrap information form a website contain the property details.
<div class="inner">
<div class="col">
<h2>House in Digana </h2>
<div class="meta">
<div class="date"></div>
<span class="category">Houses</span>,
<span class="location">Kandy</span>
</div>
</div>
<div class="attr polar">
<span class="data">Rs. 3,600,000</span>
</div>
what is the xpath notation for "Kandy" and "Rs. 3,600,000" ?
It is not wise to address text nodes directly using text() because of nuances in an XML document.
Rather, addressing an element node directly returns the concatenation of all descendant text nodes as the element value, which is what people usually want (and think they are getting when they address text nodes).
The canonical example I use in the classroom is this example of OCR'ed content as XML:
<cost>39<!--that 9 may be an 8-->.22</cost>
The value of the element using the XPath address cost is "39.22", but in XSLT 1.0 the value of the XPath address cost/text() is "39" which is not complete. In XSLT 2.0 (which is how the question is tagged), you get two text nodes "39" and ".22", which if you concatenate them it looks correct. But, if you pass them to a function requiring a singleton argument, you will get a run-time error. When you address an element, the text returned is concatenated into a single string, which is suitable for a singleton argument.
I tell students that in all of my professional work there are only very (very!) few times that I ever have to use text() in my stylesheets.
So //span[#class='location' or #class='data'] would find the two fields if those were the only such elements in the entire document. You may need to use ".//span" from a location inside of the document tree.
hey guys coudln't get around this. I have an html structured as follow:
<div class="review-text">
<div id="reviewerprofile">
<div id="revimg"></div>
<div id="reviewr">marc</div>
<div id="revdate">2011-07-06</div>
</div>
this is an awesome review
</div>
what i am trying to get is just the text "this is an awesome review" but everytyme i query the node i also get the other content in the childs. using something like this now ".//div[#class='review-text']" how to get just that text only? tank you very much
You're almost there! Just add /text() at the end of your XPath to get the text node.
An XPath expression such as //div returns a set of nodes, in this case div elements. These are in effect pointers to the original nodes in the original tree; the nodes are still connected to their parents, children, ancestors, and siblings. If you see the children of the div element and don't want them, that's not the fault of the XPath processor, it's the fault of whatever software is processing the results returned by the XPath expression.
You can get the text that's an immediate child of the div element by using /text() as suggested. However, that assumes that you know exactly what you are expecting to find in the HTML page - if "awesome" were in italics, it would give you something different.