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"].
Related
I have the following HTML
<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 more text
</div>
</div>
</span>
I want an XPath that only gets the text 09:00, not Some more text NOT using text()[1] because that causes other problems. My current XPath looks like this
("//span[1][contains(#class, 'day-time-clock')]/text()")
I want one that ignores this whole part of the HTML
<div class="tooltip-box first-free-tip ">
<div class="tooltip-box-inner">
<span class="fa fa-clock-o"></span>
Some more text
</div>
</div>
You can limit the level of descendant:: nodes with position().
So the following expression does work:
span/descendant::node()[2 > position()]
Adjust the number in the predicate to your needs, 2 is only an example. A disadvantage of this approach is that the counting of the descendants is only accurate for the first child in the descending tree.
Another approach is limiting the both: the ancestors and the descendants:
span/descendant::node()[3 > count(ancestor::*) and 1 > count(descendant::*)]
Here, too, you have to adjust the numbers in the predicates to get any useful results.
Use normalize-space() for select all non-whitespace nodes of the document:
//span[contains(#class, 'day-time-clock')]/text()[normalize-space()]
I think (if I understand you correctly) that
"..//div[contains(#class, 'tooltip-box')]/parent::span"
gets you there.
I'm trying to get the xpath of an element with a similar xpath to others but has a "neighbor" element that's different . Please see example below.
<div>
<div id='a'> </div>
<span> Text here </span> #this is what i'm trying to get
</div>
<div>
<div id='b'> </div>
<span> Text here </span>
</div>
I tried using //div//span, but this gives me the 2 spans. So i tried using //div//child::div[#id='a']//ancestor::div//child::span, but it doesn't look pleasant and looks repetitive. Does this have a better implementation?
try
//div[div[#id='a']]/span
it says get the span child node of all div nodes with child node div (with an #id equal to 'a').
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())='']
My html structure as below
<h2>Title 1</h2>
<br>
<br>
<div class="active"></div>
<h2>Title 2</h2>
<br>
<br>
<div class="active"></div>
<div></div>
<div></div>
<div class="active"></div>
<h2>Title 3</h2>
<br>
<br>
<div></div>
<div></div>
<h2>Title 4</h2>
<br>
<br>
<div></div>
<div class="active"></div>
<div></div>
I would like to get previous first h2's value according to divs which has got active class
My xpath descendants axes for selecting nodes as below
//div[contains(#class, 'active')]
I have tried ancestor and preceding axes of Xpath but not get right result
is this possible with Xpath 1.0
Note: I can use only Xpath version 1.0
Thank you in advance
This XPath expression:
//div[#class='active']/preceding-sibling::h2[1]
which can be read as
"Select the first <h2> element before every active <div> element."
should do the trick for you.
I also vote for the solution suggested by #Slanec - it is good and simple.
But if you want to make sure you are searching for an element within a particular range of elements, you can use an extended XPath:
//div[(preceding-sibling::h2 and following-sibling::h2)
or preceding-sibling::h2[not(following-sibling::h2)]]
[#class='active']
/preceding-sibling::h2[1]
It is just the same, except for here 'div' is searched within the range between 2 'h2' elements (or after the 'h2' in case there is no more 'h2' elements on the page).
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