I have element that looks like this:
<div class="unique class">
<i class="generic class">text1</i>
text2
</div>
Is there a good way to select text2 only? I may add that text2 always starts with "Following".
This is one possible XPath :
//div[#class='unique class']/text()[starts-with(normalize-space(),'Following')]
brief explanation :
//div[#class='unique class'] : find the outer div by its class
/text()[starts-with(normalize-space(),'Following')] : find text node that is direct child of the previously found div, where, after normalizing spaces, starts with text "Following".
Another alternative which doesn't consider target text node's content would be :
//div[#class='unique class']/text()[normalize-space()]
The last bit (/text()[normalize-space()]) returns non-empty text nodes, that is direct child of the outer div.
You can simply use text() on the parent div
//div[#class='unique class']/text()[2]
Related
I have the following code :
<div class = "content">
<table id="detailsTable">...</table>
<div class = "desc">
<p>Some text</p>
</div>
<p>Another text<p>
</div>
I want to select all the text within the 'content' class, which I would get using this xPath :
doc.xpath('string(//div[#class="content"])')
The problem is that it selects all the text including text within the 'table' tag. I need to exclude the 'table' from the xPath. How would I achieve that?
XPath 1.0 solutions :
substring-after(string(//div[#class="content"]),string(//div[#class="content"]/table))
Or just use concat :
concat(//table/following::p[1]," ",//table/following::p[2])
The XPath expression //div[#class="content"] selects the div element - nothing more and nothing less - and applying the string() function gives you the string value of the element, which is the concatenation of all its descendant text nodes.
Getting all the text except for that containing in one particular child is probably not possible in XPath 1.0. With XPath 2.0 it can be done as
string-join(//div[#class="content"]/(node() except table)//text(), '')
But for this kind of manipulation, you're really in the realm of transformation rather than pure selection, so you're stretching the limits of what XPath is designed for.
I am searching a solution to remove a string value obtained on a webpage with an XPath function.
I have this :
<div id="article_body" class="">
This my wonderful sentence, however here the string i dont want :
<br><br>
<div class="typo">Found a typo in the article? Click here.
</div>
</div>
So at the end I would have
This my wonderful sentence, however here the string i dont want :
I get the text with
//*[#id="article_body"]
Then I try to use replace:
//replace('*[#id="article_body"]','Found a typo in the article? ', )
But it doesn't work, so I think it's because I'm a newbie with XPath...
How can I do that please?
It appears that you are getting the computed string value of the selected div element.
The string-value of an element node is the concatenation of the string-values of all text node descendants of the element node in document order.
If you don't want to include the text() from the descendant nodes, and only want the text() that are immediate children of the div, then adjust your XPath:
//*[#id="article_body"]/text()
Otherwise, you could use substring-before():
substring-before(//*[#id="article_body"], 'Found a typo in the article?')
I need to extract all children which have nodes with some text. Html structure might be the following:
<div>
<div>
A
</div>
<p>
<b>A</b>
</p>
<span>
B
</span>
</div>
I need to extract child nodes which have "A" text. It should return div and p nodes
I tried the following xpaths:
./*/*[contains(text(), 'A')]
./*/*[./*[contains(text(), 'A')]]
but the first one returns only div with "A" text and the second one returns only p with "A" text
Is it possible to construct xpath which will return both children?
Node containing "A" text might be at any level in the child node
If you need XPath that returns both child nodes, try to use
./*/*[contains(., "A")]
I suspect contains() is wrong here, unless you really want to select a node whose value is "HAT" as well as one whose value is "A".
Try
*/*[normalize-space(.)='A']
I'm trying to perform html scrapping of a webpage. I like to fetch the three alternate text (alt - highlighted) from the three "img" elements.
I'm using the following code extract the whole "img" element of slide-1.
from lxml import html
import requests
page = requests.get('sample.html')
tree = html.fromstring(page.content)
text_val = tree.xpath('//a[class="cover-wrapper"][id = "slide-1"]/text()')
print text_val
I'm not getting the alternate text values displayed. But it is an empty list.
HTML Script used:
This is one possible XPath :
//div[#id='slide-1']/a[#class='cover-wrapper']/img/#alt
Explanation :
//div[#id='slide-1'] : This part find the target <div> element by comparing the id attribute value. Notice the use #attribute_name syntax to reference attribute in XPath. Missing the # symbol would change the XPath selector meaning to be referencing a -child- element with the same name, instead of an attribute.
/a[#class='cover-wrapper'] : from each <div> element found by the previous bit of the XPath, find child element <a> that has class attribute value equals 'cover-wrapper'
/img/#alt : then from each of such <a> elements, find child element <img> and return its alt attribute
You might want to change the id filter to be starts-with(#id,'slide-') if you meant to return the all 3 alt attributes in the screenshot.
Try this:
//a[#class="cover-wrapper"]/img/#alt
So, I am first selecting the node having a tag and class as cover-wrapper and then I select the node img and then the attribute alt of img.
To find the whole image element :
//a[#class="cover-wrapper"]
I think you want:
//div[#class="showcase-wrapper"][#id="slide-1"]/a/img/#alt
I am trying to find a way to search for a string within nodes, but excluding ythe content of some subelements of those nodes. Plain and simple, I want to search for a string in paragraphs of a text, excluding the footnotes which are children elements of the paragraphs.
For example,
My document being:
<document>
<p n="1">My text starts here/</p>
<p n="2">Then it goes on there<footnote>It's not a very long text!</footnote></p>
</document>
When I'm searching for "text", I would like the Xpath / XQuery to retrieve the first p element, but not the second one (where "text" is contained only in the footnote subelement).
I have tried the contains() function, but it retrieves both p elements.
Any help would be much appreciated :)
I want to search for a string in
paragraphs of a text, excluding the
footnotes which are children elements
of the paragraphs
An XPath 1.0 - only solution:
Use:
//p//text()[not(ancestor::footnote) and contains(.,'text')]
Against the following XML document (obtained from yours but added p s within a footnote to make this more interesting):
<document>
<p n="1">My text starts here/</p>
<p n="2">Then it goes on there
<footnote>It's not a very long text!
<p>text</p>
</footnote>
</p>
</document>
this XPath expression selects exactly the wanted text node:
My text starts here/
//p[(.//text() except .//footnote//text())[contains(., 'text')]]
/document/p[text()[contains(., 'text')]] should do.
For the record, as a complement to the other answers, I've found this workaround that also seems to do the job:
//p[contains(child::text()|not(descendant::footnote), "text")]