xpath:how to find a node that not contains text? - xpath

I have a html like:
...
<div class="grid">
"abc"
<span class="searchMatch">def</span>
</div>
<div class="grid">
<span class="searchMatch">def</span>
</div>
...
I want to get the div which not contains text,but xpath
//div[#class='grid' and text()='']
seems doesn't work,and if I don't know the text that other divs have,how can I find the node?

Let's suppose I have inferred the requirement correctly as:
Find all <div> elements with #class='grid' that have no directly-contained non-whitespace text content, i.e. no non-whitespace text content unless it's within a child element like a <span>.
Then the answer to this is
//div[#class='grid' and not(text()[normalize-space(.)])]

You need a not() statement + normalize-space() :
//div[#class='grid' and not(normalize-space(text()))]
or
//div[#class='grid' and normalize-space(text())='']

Related

XPATH help needed for text()

<div class="from">
<span class="label">Reported by: Rhjj,
<span class="ocation">US</span>
</span> <span class="dat"> </span> </div>
Here I just want the output as "Reported by :Rhjj". But when i use the XPATH as
//div[contains(#class,"from")]//span[contains(#class,"label")] "US" also gets selected.
Is there any other way to select only Reported by: Rhjj, other than using text() and using substring_before comma. Even this is not consistent
//div[contains(#class,"fromTime")]//span[contains(#class,"label")]/text()
The text you want is the first node under the span element with an attribute named class (note I've taken the names from the XML, not your code.). This works for the snippet of XML you've provided.
/div[#class="from"]/span[#class="label"]/node()[1]

Select all nodes between two elements excluding unnecessary element from the intersection using XPath

There’s a document structured as follows:
<div class="document">
<div class="title">
<AAA/>
</div class="title">
<div class="lead">
<BBB/>
</div class="lead">
<div class="photo">
<CCC/>
</div class="photo">
<div class="text">
<!-- tags in text sections can vary. they can be `div` or `p` or anything. -->
<DDD>
<EEE/>
<DDD/>
<CCC/>
<FFF/>
<FFF>
<GGG/>
</FFF>
</DDD>
</div class="text">
<div class="more_text">
<DDD>
<EEE/>
<DDD/>
<CCC/>
<FFF/>
<FFF>
<GGG/>
</FFF>
</DDD>
</div class="more_text">
<div class="other_stuff">
<DDD/>
</div class="other_stuff">
</div class="document">
The task is to grab all the elements between <div class="lead"> and <div class="other_stuff"> except the <div class="photo"> element.
The Kayessian method for node-set intersection $ns1[count(.|$ns2) = count($ns2)] works perfectly. After substituting $ns1 with //*[#class="lead"]/following::* and $ns2 with //*[#class="other_stuff"]/preceding::*,
the working code looks like this:
//*[#class="lead"]/following::*[count(. | //*[#class="other_stuff"]/preceding::*)
= count(//*[#class="other_stuff"]/preceding::*)]/text()
It selects everything between <div class="lead"> and <div class="other_stuff"> including the <div class="photo"> element. I tried several ways to insert not() selector in the formula itself
//*[#class="lead" and not(#class="photo ")]/following::*
//*[#class="lead"]/following::*[not(#class="photo ")]
//*[#class="lead"]/following::*[not(self::class="photo ")]
(the same things with /preceding::* part) but they don't work. It looks like this not() method is ignored – the <div class="photo"> element remains in the selection.
Question 1: How to exclude the unnecessary element from this intersection?
It’s not an option to select from <div class="photo"> element excluding it automatically because in other documents it can appear in any position or doesn't appear at all.
Question 2 (additional): Is it OK to use * after following:: and preceding:: in this case?
It initially selects everything up to the end and to the beginning of the whole document. Could it be better to specify the exact end point for the following:: and preceding:: ways? I tried //*[#class="lead"]/following::[#class="other_stuff"] but it doesn’t seem to work.
Question 1: How to exclude the unnecessary element from this intersection?
Adding another predicate, [not(self::div[#class='photo'])] in this case, to your working XPath should do. For this particular case, the entire XPath would look like this (formatted for readability) :
//*[#class="lead"]
/following::*[
count(. | //*[#class="other_stuff"]/preceding::*)
=
count(//*[#class="other_stuff"]/preceding::*)
][not(self::div[#class='photo'])]
/text()
Question 2 (additional): Is it OK to use * after following:: and preceding:: in this case?
I'm not sure if it would be 'better', what I can tell is following::[#class="other_stuff"] is invalid expression. You need to mention the element to which the predicate will be applied, for example, 'any element' following::*[#class="other_stuff"], or just 'div' following::div[#class="other_stuff"].

Xpath: select div that contains class AND whose specific child element contains text

With the help of this SO question I have an almost working xpath:
//div[contains(#class, 'measure-tab') and contains(., 'someText')]
However this gets two divs: in one it's the child td that has someText, the other it's child span.
How do I narrow it down to the one with the span?
<div class="measure-tab">
<!-- table html omitted -->
<td> someText</td>
</div>
<div class="measure-tab"> <-- I want to select this div (and use contains #class)
<div>
<span> someText</span> <-- that contains a deeply nested span with this text
</div>
</div>
To find a div of a certain class that contains a span at any depth containing certain text, try:
//div[contains(#class, 'measure-tab') and contains(.//span, 'someText')]
That said, this solution looks extremely fragile. If the table happens to contain a span with the text you're looking for, the div containing the table will be matched, too. I'd suggest to find a more robust way of filtering the elements. For example by using IDs or top-level document structure.
You can use ancestor. I find that this is easier to read because the element you are actually selecting is at the end of the path.
//span[contains(text(),'someText')]/ancestor::div[contains(#class, 'measure-tab')]
You could use the xpath :
//div[#class="measure-tab" and .//span[contains(., "someText")]]
Input :
<root>
<div class="measure-tab">
<td> someText</td>
</div>
<div class="measure-tab">
<div>
<div2>
<span>someText2</span>
</div2>
</div>
</div>
</root>
Output :
Element='<div class="measure-tab">
<div>
<div2>
<span>someText2</span>
</div2>
</div>
</div>'
You can change your second condition to check only the span element:
...and contains(div/span, 'someText')]
If the span isn't always inside another div you can also use
...and contains(.//span, 'someText')]
This searches for the span anywhere inside the div.

xquery/xpath- how to get number of descendant nodes of a particular type

Take a look at the sample XML below--
<div id="main">
<div id="1">
Some random text
</div>
<div id="2">
Some random text
</div>
<div id="3">
Some random text
</div>
<p> Some more random text</p>
<div id="4">
Some random text
</div>
</div>
Now, how do I find out the number of divs within the main div using Xquery? And how to do this in XPath?
You can use the following XPath:
count(div[#id="main"]/div)
The function count does the counting, the main div is selected by its id.
The XPath expressions below can be used both in XPath and XQuery. This is so, because XPath (2.0) is a proper subset of XQuery.
Use:
count(/*//div)
If "the main div" isn't the top element of the XML document, and this is the only div whose id attribute has string value of "main", use:
count((//div[#id='main'])[1]//div)
If it is guaranteed that the div children of the "main div" dont have div descendents, use:
count((//div[#id='main'])[1]/div)
Do note: The XPath pseudo-operator // can be very inefficient -- this is why, always try to avoid using it, whenever the structure of the XML document is statically known and specific paths can be used.

How to get a list of concatenated text nodes

My purpose is to request on a xml structure, using only one XPath evaluation, in order to get a list of strings containing the concatenation of text3 and text5 for each "my_class" div.
The structure example is given below:
<div>
<div>
<div class="my_class">
<div class="my_class_1"></div>
<div class="my_class_2">text2</div>
<div class="my_class_3">
text3
<div class="my_class_4">text4</div>
<div class="my_class_5">text5</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="my_class_6"></div>
</div>
<div>
<div class="my_class">
<div class="my_class_1"></div>
<div class="my_class_2">text12</div>
<div class="my_class_3">
text13
<div class="my_class_4">text14</div>
<div class="my_class_5">text15</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
This means I want to get this list of results:
- in index 0 => text3 text5
- in index 1 => text13 text15
I currently can only get the my_class nodes, but with the text12 that I want to exclude ; or a list of each string, not concatened.
How I could proceed ?
Thanks in advance for helping.
EDIT : I remove text4 and text14 from my search to be exact in my example
EDIT: Now the question has changed...
XPath 1.0: There is no such thing as "list of strings" data type. You can use this expression to select all the container elements of the text nodes you want:
/div/div/div[#class='my_class']/div[#class='my_class_3']
And then get with the proper DOM method of your host language the string value of every of those selected elements (the concatenation of all descendant text nodes) the descendat text nodes you want and concatenate their string value with the proper relative XPath or DOM method:
text()[1]|div[#class='my_class_5']
XPath 2.0: There is a sequence data type.
/div/div/div[#class='my_class']
/div[#class='my_class_3']
/concat(text()[1],div[#class='my_class_5'])
Could you not just use:
//my_class/my_class_3
And then get the .innerText from that? There might be a bit of spacing cleanup to do but it should contain all the inside text (including that from the class 4 and 5) but without the tags.
Edit: After clairification
concat(/div/div/div[#class=my_class]/div[#class=my_class_3]/text(), ' ', /div/div/div[#class=my_class]/div[#class=my_class_5]/text())
That might work

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