Consider this HTML:
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<h1>title</h1>
<h3>item 1</h3>
text details for item 1
<h3>item 2</h3>
text details for item 2
<h3>item 3</h3>
text details for item 3
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
I'm not terribly familiar with XPath, but it seems to me that there is no notation which will match the "text details" sections individually. Can you confirm?
Use:
/html/body/table/tr/td/h3/following-sibling::text()[1]
This means: Get the first following sibling text node of every h3 element that is a child of every tr element that is a child of every table element that is a child of every body element that is a child of the html top element.
Or, if you only know that the wanted text nodes are the immediate following siblings of all h3 elements in the docunent, then tis XPath expression selects them:
//h3/following-sibling::text()[1]
in the world of Xml/Xpath
Text - is a type of Element Node.
so considering your example
TD has 7 child nodes
TD.getChild(3) should return the "text details for item 1" Value.
in XPath
$x//table/tr/td/text()[1]
Related
I'm trying to access a certain element from by using XML but I just can't seem to get it, and I don't understand quite why.
<ul class="test1" id="content">
<li class="list">
<p>Insert random text here</p>
<div class="author">
</div>
</li>
<li class="list">
<p>I need this text here</p>
</li>
</ul>
Basically the text I want is the second one but I want/need to use something similar to p[not(div)] as to retrieve it.
I have tried the methods from the following link but to no avail (xpath find node that does not contain child)
Here is how I tried accessing the text:
ul[contains(#id,"content")]//p[not(.//div)]/text()
If you have any possible answers, thank you !
The HTML snippet posted in question shows that both p elements do not contain any div, so the expression //p[not(.//div)] would match both p. The first p element is sibling of the div (both shares the same parent element li) instead of parent or ancestor. The following XPath expression would match text nodes from the 2nd p and not those from the first one:
//ul[contains(#id,"content")]/li[not(div)]/p/text()
Brief explanation:
//ul[contains(#id,"content")]: find ul elements where id attribute value contains text "content"
/li[not(div)]: from such ul find child elements li that don't have child element div. This will match only the end li in the example HTML
/p/text(): from such li, find child elements p and then return child text nodes form such p
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.
I have the following HTML structure:
<p>
<!-- Span can be any level deep -->
<span>
Some text
</span>
</p>
<!-- Any number of different elements between span and table -->
<p></p>
<div></div>
<table>
<tr>
<td></td>
</tr>
</table>
Using Nokogiri and custom XPath functions I am able to select the <span> element containing context that matches the regex. I am forced to do it this way since Nokogiri is using XPath 1.0 and there is no support for the matches selector:
#doc.xpath("//span[regex_match(text(), '/some text/i')]")
Having the span node selected, how do I select the table that is visually following the span?
I use the contains function to match the text. Then use following::table to find the table following this span tag.
#doc.xpath("//span[contains(text(), 'Some text')]/following::table")
I need to get the "a" element inside a "td" element from a row in a table of several similar rows. The problem is I only have the name 'john'. How can I find john td -> get the parent "tr" -> and then get "a" in XPath?
Code example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<html>
<table>
...
<tr id='1'>
<td name='john'>
</td>
<td>
<a id='clickable'/>
</td>
<td>
</td>
</tr>
...
</table>
</html>
I would write this XPath expression like this:
//td[#name="john"]/following-sibling::td[1]/a
This does:
//
from any depth
td
find a td element
[#name="john"]
with a name attribute equal to 'john'
/following-sibling::
now look among its following sibling elements
td
and find another td
[1]
get the first one
/a
and get its children that are a elements
How about:
//a[ancestor::tr[td/#name = 'john']]
What I would do :
//*[#name="john"]/../td/a/#id
basically i want to select a node (div) in which it's children node's(h1,b,h3) contain specified text.
<html>
<div id="contents">
<p>
<h1> Child text 1</h1>
<b> Child text 2 </b>
...
</p>
<h3> Child text 3 </h3>
</div>
i am expecting, /html/div/ not /html/div/h1
i have this below, but unfortunately returns the children, instead of the xpath to the div.
expression = "//div[contains(text(), 'Child text 1')]"
doc.xpath(expression)
i am expecting, /html/div/ not /html/div/h1
So is there a way to do this simply with xpath syntax?
The following expression gives a node (div) in which any children nodes (not just h1,b,h3) contain specified text (not the div itself):
doc.xpath('//div[.//*[contains(text(), "Child text 1")]]')
you can refine that and return the only the div with the id contents like in your example:
doc.xpath('//div[#id="contents" and .//*[contains(text(), "Child text 1")]]')
It does not match, if the text is a text node of the div (directly inside the div), which is my interpretation of the question.
You could append "/.." to anchor back to the parent. Not sure if there's a more robust method.
expression = "//div[contains(text(), 'Child text 1')]/.."