I have the following which is the second span in html with the class of 'ProductListOurRef':
<span class="ProductListOurRef">Product Code: 60076</span>
Ive tried the following Xpath:
(//span[#class="ProductListOurRef"])[2]
But that returns 'Product Code: 60076'. But I need to use Xpath to strip the 'Product Code: ' to just give me the result of '60076'.
I believe 'substring-after' should do it but i dont know how to write it
If you are using XPath 1.0, then the result of an XPath expression must be either a node-set, a single string, a single number, or a single boolean.
As shown in comments on the question, you can write a query using substring-after(), whose result is a string.
However, some applications expect the result of an XPath expression always to be a node-set, and it looks as if you are stuck with such an application. Because you can't construct new nodes in XPath (you can only select nodes that are already present in the input), there is no way around this.
Related
Can anyone please help me here ?
I want to run two xpath together and store the value, I am not sure if it is possible.
My one xpath is fetching City and second is state
//div[(text()='city')]/following-sibling::div
//div[contains(text(),'state')]/following-sibling::div
As xpath is telling name of city and state is provided in next div of city and state. I want to run both and capture output in string format.
On side note: both xpath is working fine for me.
<div>
<div>City</div>
<div>London</div>
</div>
<--In between some other elements like p, section other divs-->
<div>
<div>state</div>
<div>England</div>
</div>
It sounds like you want to convert the results of the two XPath expressions to strings, and concatenate those strings. The expression below concatenates them (with a single space between) using the XPath concat function.
concat(
//div[(text()='city')]/following-sibling::div,
' ',
//div[contains(text(),'state')]/following-sibling::div
)
One other thing: note that in your example XML the text of the first div is "City" rather than "city". Make sure the strings in your XPath expression match the text exactly because the expression 'City'='city' evaluates to false
I am trying to use XPath function contains() that has a string in 2 parts but it is throwing an "invalid xpath expression" error upon evaluation.
Here is what I am trying to achieve:
Normal working xpath:
//*[contains(text(),'some_text')]
Now I want to break it up in 2 parts as some random text is populating in between:
//*[contains(text(),'some'+ +'text')]
What I have done is to use '+' '+' to concatenate string in expression as we do in Java. Please suggest how can i get through this.
You can combine 2 contains() in one predicate expression to check if a text node contains 2 specific substrings :
//*[text()[contains(.,'some') and contains(.,'text')]]
demo
If you need to be more specific by making sure that 'text' comes somewhere after 'some' in the text node, then you can use combination of substring-after() and contains() as shown below :
//*[text()[contains(substring-after(.,'some'),'text')]]
demo
If each target elements always contains one text node, or if only the first text node need to be considered in case multiple text nodes found in an element, then the above XPath can be simplified a bit as follow :
//*[contains(substring-after(text(),'some'),'text')]
I have this query //*[#id="test"]/div/[not(contains(.,'/explore'))]
I want to add a second 'not contains' command to this:
//*[#id="test"]/div/[not(contains(.,'/locations'))]
And maybe even a 3rd one. Does anyone know how to do this?
None of what you posted is a valid XPath expression. If you meant to filter the div element so that only div that doesn't contain certain string, say "/explore", is returned, you can do this way instead :
//*[#id="test"]/div[not(contains(.,'/explore'))]
and another XPath example that check if the div doesn't contain any of 2 strings, "/explore" and "/locations" :
//*[#id="test"]/div[not(contains(.,'/explore')) and not(contains(.,'/locations'))]
If I have two XPath queries where the second one is meant to further drill down the result of the first, can I safely let my script combine them into a single query by...
placing parenthesis around the first query,
prefixing the second query with with a slash, and then
simply concatenating the two strings ?
Context
The concrete usecase that sparked this question involves extracting information from XML/XHTML documents according to externally supplied pairs of "CSS selector + attribute name" using XPath behind the scenes.
For example the script may get the following as input:
selector: a#home, a.chapter
attribute: href
It then compiles the selector to an XPath query using the HTML::Selector::XPath Perl module, and the attribute by simply prefixing a # ... which in this case would yield:
XPath query 1: //a[#id='home'] | //a[contains(concat(' ', #class, ' '), ' chapter ')]
XPath query 2: #href
And then it repeatedly passes those queries to libxml2's XPath engine to extract the requested information (in this example, a list of URLs) from the XML documents in question.
It works, but I would prefer to combine the two queries into a single one, which would simplify the code for invoking them and reduce the performance overhead:
XPath query: (//a[#id='home'] | //a[contains(concat(' ', #class, ' '), ' chapter ')])/#href
(note the added parenthesis and slash)
But is this safe to do programmatically, for arbitrary input queries?
In general, no, you can't concatenate two arbitrary XPath expressions in this way, especially not in XPath 1.0. It's easy to find counter-examples: in XPath 1.0 you can't even have a union expression on the RHS of '/', so concatenating "/a" and "(b|c)" would fail.
In XPath 2.0, the result will always be syntactically valid, but in may contain type errors, e.g. if the expressions are "count(a)" and "b". The LHS operand of "/" must evaluate to a sequence of nodes.
Sure, this should work. However, you will always have to respect the correct context. If the elements in your example in the first query have no href attribute, you will get an empty result set.
Also, you will have to take care of e.g. a leading slash in front of your second query, so that you don't end up with a descendant-or-self axis step, which might not be what you want. Apart from that, this should always work - The worst that can happen that it is not logical correct (i.e. you don't get the expected result), but it should always be valid XPath.
I have an XML document that contains items with dashes I'd like to strip
e.g.
<xmlDoc>
<items>
<item>a-b-c</item>
<item>c-d-e</item>
<items>
</xmlDoc>
I know I can find-replace a single item using this xpath
/xmldoc/items/item[1]/translate(text(),'-','')
Which will return
"abc"
however, how do I do this for the entire set?
This doesn't work
/xmldoc/items/item/translate(text(),'-','')
Nor this
translate(/xmldoc/items/item/text(),'-','')
Is there a way at all to achieve that?
I know I can find-replace a single
item using this xpath
/xmldoc/items/item[1]/translate(text(),'-','')
Which will return
"abc"
however, how do I do this for the
entire set?
This cannot be done with a single XPath 1.0 expression.
Use the following XPath 2.0 expression to produce a sequence of strings, each being the result of the application of the translate() function on the string value of the corresponding node:
/xmlDoc/items/item/translate(.,'-', '')
The translate function accepts in input a string and not a node-set. This means that writing something like:
"translate(/xmlDoc/items/item/text(),'-','')"
or
"translate(/xmlDoc/items/item,'-','')"
will result in a function call on the first node only (item[1]).
In XPath 1.0 I think you have no other chances than doing something ugly like:
"concat(translate(/xmlDoc/items/item,'-',''),
translate(/xmlDoc/items/item[2],'-',''))"
Which is privative for a huge list of items and returns just a string.
In XPath 2.0 this can be solved nicely using for expressions:
"for $item in /xmlDoc/items/item
return replace($item,'-','')"
Which returns a sequence type:
abc cde
PS Do no confuse function calls with location paths. They are different kind of expressions, and in XPath 1.0 can not be mixed.
here is yet anther example, running it against chrome developer tools, in prepartion for a selenium test.
$x("//table[#id='sometable_table']//tr[1=1 and ./td[2=2 and position()=2 and .//*[translate(text(), ',', '') ='1001'] ] ]/td[position()=2]")
Essentially the the data sometable_table has a column containing numbers that appear localized. For example 1001 would appear as 1,001. With the above you have somewhat nasty xpath expression.
Where first you select all table rows. Then you focus on the data of the position 2 table data for the row. Then you go deeper into the contents of the position=2 table data expand the data on the cell until you find any node whose text after string replacement is 1001. Finally you ask for the table at position 2 to be returned.
But since all your main filters are at the table row level, you could be doing additional filters at table data columns at other positions as well, if you need to find the appropriate table row that has content (A) on a cell column and content (B) on a different column.
NOTE:
It was actually quite nasty to write this, because intuitively, we all google for XPATH replace string. So I was getting furstrated trying to use xpath replace until i realized chrome supports XPATH 1.0. In xpath 1.0 the string functions that exist are different from xpath 2.0, you need to use this translate function.
See reference:
http://www.edankert.com/xpathfunctions.html