Let's say I have an XML that looks like this:
<a>
<b>
<![CDATA[some text]]>
<c>xxx</c>
<d>yyy</d>
</b>
</a>
I can't find a way to get "some text". Any idea?
If I'm using "a/b" it returns also xxx and yyy
If I'm using "a/b/text()" it returns nothing
You can't actually select a CDATA section: CDATA is just a way of telling the parser to avoid unescaping special characters, and your input document looks to XPath exactly the same as:
<a>
<b>
some text
<c>xxx</c>
<d>yyy</d>
</b>
</a>
(Having said that, if you're using DOM, then some DOM XPath engines fail to implement the spec correctly, and treat the CDATA content as a separate text node from the text outside the CDATA section).
The XPath expression a/b/text() should select three text nodes, of which the first contains "some text" along with surrounding whitespace.
With the XPath data model the path /a/b/text()[1] should select a text node with the string value
some text
that is a line break, some spaces, the text some text followed by a line break and some spaces.
Related
How can I find all tags that have text "world"?
<c>
<a>
<b>hello</b>
world
</a>
</c>
Expected result should be tag 'a'.
I am trying //a[contains(text(),'world')] but it doesn't give anything.
This 'a' tag is kind of mix of text and another tag.
Try this one:
(//*[contains(., "world")])[last()]
or if you know for sure that it will be a node:
//a[contains(.,'world')]
Also check the difference between string value and text node
I have the following HTML, and I need to get the text that is outside of the bold tag. For instance 'Submitted At:' I need to get the timestamp that follows. You will see that 'Submitted At: is surrounded by bold tags and the timestamp follows and I can not retrieve it.
<body>
<h2> … </h2>
<b> … </b>
jenkins
<br></br>
<b> … </b>
<br></br>
<b> … </b>
…
<br></br>
<b> … </b>
<br></br>
<b>
Submitted At:
</b>
29-Jan-2016 17:12:24
Things I have tried.
#browser.body.text.split("\n")
#browser.body.split("\n")
body_html = Nokogiri::HTML.parse(#browser.body.html)
body_html.xpath("//body//b").text
returned: "User: JobName: JobConf: Job-ACLs: All users are allowedSubmitted At: Launched At: Finished At: Status: Analyse This Job"
I have tried several things such as xpath, plain old text retrieval, but I am not able to get what I need. I have also done several searches and can't find what I need.
To start with, html bereft of classes and ids is always going to provide a challenge. It is going to be even worse when you want to access text that is merely in the body tag.
In this specific instance, this should work:
browser.b(index: 4)
InnerHtml is literally what it is - its inside a HTMLstart and end tag. So you are looking at InnerHtml of the outer tag actually - <body>.
The .text of <Body> tag will give you entire text. If the tags are gonna be dynamic index is not going to work. So if you know the timestamp length is gonna always be same, Get the entire text, delimit/unstring based on this string 'Submitted At:' to max timestamp length. This will be stable solution rather than a hardcoded Index value if it may change. Ie pickup substring starting from that tag to max length of timestamp.
The HTML appears to have a structure of:
a <b> tag that is the field description and
a following text node that is the field value.
Watir can only return the concatenation of all an element's text nodes. As a result, it does not deal well with this structure, which needs the text nodes separated. While you could parse the concatenated String, it could be error prone depending on the possible field descriptions/values.
I would therefore suggest parsing the HTML with Nokogiri as it can return individual text nodes. This would look like:
html = browser.html
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(html)
p doc.at_xpath('//b[normalize-space(text()) = "Submitted At:"]
/following-sibling::text()[1]').text.strip
#=> "29-Jan-2016 17:12:24"
Here we are using an XPath to find the <b> tag that contains the relevant field description, "Submitted At:". From that node, we find the text node, ie the "29-Jan-2016 17:12:24", that comes right after it.
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 have some html that looks pretty much like this.
<p>
<a img src="img src">
<strong>foo</strong>
<strong>bar</strong>
<strong>baz</strong>
<strong>eek</strong>
This is the text I want to select using xpath.
</p>
How can I select only this particular text node as indicated above using xpath?
How do I get at only this particular
text element in question using xpath?
Use:
/p/text()[last()]
"/p/text()" xpath expression will select the text from "p" node in above XML (Posted in question).
/p/text()[normalize-space()]
this will remove trailing spaces from string. This xpath produces exactly what you want.
There is very good tutorial at http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/
using nokogiri,
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(your_html)
doc.xpath("//text()").to_s
this does the job, however, it puts everything into one flat text.
i need to take each text surrounded via html tags
<b> text</b>
<h1>text3</b>
and put them into array. ["text", "text3"]
what is the recommended action ?
i thought of doing
doc.xpath("*").text
but dont know how to iterate through it all.
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(your_html)
doc.xpath("//text()").to_a