XPATH - Extract Data from elements - xpath

Following is the data and Select statement to work with :
declare #XMLdata xml
set #XMLdata = '
<taggroup key="pros" name="Le pour">
<tag isuseradded="false" count="1">Bonne qualité</tag>
<tag isuseradded="false" count="1">Correspond à mes attentes</tag>
<tag isuseradded="true" count="1">Impeccable</tag>
<tag isuseradded="false" count="1">Prix abordable</tag>
</taggroup>
'
select
ParamValues.ID.value('(./#key)','nvarchar(max)') as TagGroupKey,
ParamValues.ID.value('(./#name)','nvarchar(max)') as TagGroupName,
ParamValues.ID.value('(./tag)[1]','nvarchar(max)') as TagValue,
from #XMLData.nodes('taggroup') as ParamValues(ID)
I need to extract the 4 tag values
(Bonne qualité,Correspond à mes attentes,Impeccable,Prix abordable)
without actually going to the tag level since that is impacting the performance.

I am not 100% sure what you are looking for, but to get all of the data under tag without the tag element itself you would use the following xpath:
./tag/text()
This (in XPATH, I am not sure about sql xml query) would return a nodeset of TEXT elements with all of the values under tag separately. So if you had 4 tag elements, there would be four separate TEXT elements.

Related

Is it possible to select the properties of a node a XPATH?

I have an XML of the form:
<articleslist>
<articles>
<originalId>507948</originalId>
<title>Hogan Lovells Training Contract</title>
<slug>hogan-lovells-training-contract</slug>
<metaTitle>Hogan Lovells Training Contract</metaTitle>
<metaDescription>Find out about the Hogan Lovells Training Contract and Application Process</metaDescription>
<language>en</language>
<disableAds>false</disableAds>
<shortUrl>false</shortUrl>
<category_slug>law</category_slug>
<subcategory_slug>industry</subcategory_slug>
<updatedAt>2021-03-15T18:38:51.058+00:00</updatedAt>
<createdAt>2018-11-29T06:42:51.665+00:00</createdAt>
</articles>
</articlelist>
I'm able to select the row values with the XPATH //articles.
How can I select the child properties of articles (i.e. the column headings), so I get back a list of the form:
originalId
title
slug
etc...
Depends on your XPath version.
In XPath 2.0 it's simply //articles/*/name()
In 1.0 it's not possible because there's no such data type as a "sequence of strings". You would have to return the set of elements as //articles/*, and then extract their names in the calling program.

Xpath expression (nokogiri) to get tag's child element?

From my xml, I can get this :
<home>
<creditors>
<count>2</count>
</creditors>
</home>
OR even this :
<home>
<creditors>
<moreThan>2</moreThan>
</creditors>
</home>
Which xpath expression can I use to get "<count>2</count>" instead of getting only "2" OR to get "<moreThan>2</moreThan>" instead of getting "2" ?
This XPath,
//creditors/count
will select all count child elements of all creditors elements in the XML document.
Update per OP's request in comments for a single XPath that selects both count and moreThan elements:
This XPath,
//creditors/*[self::count or self::moreThan]
will select all count or moreThan child elements of all creditors elements in the XML document.
Assuming that your xpath expression is OK, you just need to convert the element to string:
doc.xpath("home/creditors/*").to_s
=> "<count>2</count>"
Please check with queries returning more than one element, to make sure that it's desired behaviour.

XPath expression: selecting text nodes between element nodes

Based in the following HTML I want to extract TextA, TextC and TextE.
<div id='content'>
TextA
<br/>
<br/>
<p>TextB</p>
TextC
<br/>
TextC
<p>TextD</p>
TextE
</div>
I tried to get TextC like so but I don't get the result I want:
Query:
//*[preceding::p[contains(.,"TextB")] and following::p[contains(.,"TextD")]]
Expected result:
["TextC", <br/>, "TextC"]
Actual result:
[<br/>]
Is there a way to select the text nodes without using indexes like //div/text()[1]?
The reason why the two text nodes aren't in the result of your XPath is because * only match elements. To match both element and text node you can use node() instead :
//node()[preceding::p[contains(.,"TextB")] and following::p[contains(.,"TextD")]]
Demo
Or if you want to get the text nodes only i.e excluding <br/>, you can use text() instead of node():
//text()[preceding::p[contains(.,"TextB")] and following::p[contains(.,"TextD")]]

XPath expression for selecting all text in a given node, and the text of its chldren

Basically I need to scrape some text that has nested tags.
Something like this:
<div id='theNode'>
This is an <span style="color:red">example</span> <b>bolded</b> text
</div>
And I want an expression that will produce this:
This is an example bolded text
I have been struggling with this for hour or more with no result.
Any help is appreciated
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.
You want to call the XPath string() function on the div element.
string(//div[#id='theNode'])
You can also use the normalize-space function to reduce unwanted whitespace that might appear due to newlines and indenting in the source document. This will remove leading and trailing whitespace and replace sequences of whitespace characters with a single space. When you pass a nodeset to normalize-space(), the nodeset will first be converted to it's string-value. If no arguments are passed to normalize-space it will use the context node.
normalize-space(//div[#id='theNode'])
// if theNode was the context node, you could use this instead
normalize-space()
You might want use a more efficient way of selecting the context node than the example XPath I have been using. eg, the following Javascript example can be run against this page in some browsers.
var el = document.getElementById('question');
var result = document.evaluate('normalize-space()', el, null ).stringValue;
The whitespace only text node between the span and b elements might be a problem.
Use:
string(//div[#id='theNode'])
When this expression is evaluated, the result is the string value of the first (and hopefully only) div element in the document.
As the string value of an element is defined in the XPath Specification as the concatenation in document order of all of its text-node descendants, this is exactly the wanted string.
Because this can include a number of all-white-space text nodes, you may want to eliminate contiguous leading and trailing white-space and replace any such intermediate white-space by a single space character:
Use:
normalize-space(string(//div[#id='theNode']))
XSLT - based verification:
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
"<xsl:copy-of select="string(//div[#id='theNode'])"/>"
===========
"<xsl:copy-of select="normalize-space(string(//div[#id='theNode']))"/>"
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
when this transformation is applied on the provided XML document:
<div id='theNode'> This is an
<span style="color:red">example</span>
<b>bolded</b> text
</div>
the two XPath expressions are evaluated and the results of these evaluations are copied to the output:
" This is an
example
bolded text
"
===========
"This is an example bolded text"
If you are using scrapy in python, you can use descendant-or-self::*/text(). Full example:
txt = """<div id='theNode'>
This is an <span style="color:red">example</span> <b>bolded</b> text
</div>"""
selector = scrapy.Selector(text=txt, type="html") # Create HTML doc from HTML text
all_txt = selector.xpath('//div/descendant-or-self::*/text()').getall()
final_txt = ''.join( _ for _ in all_txt).strip()
print(final_txt) # 'This is an example bolded text'
How about this :
/div/text()[1] | /div/span/text() | /div/b/text() | /div/text()[2]
Hmmss I am not sure about the last part though. You might have to play with that.
normal code
//div[#id='theNode']
to get all text but if they become split then
//div[#id='theNode']/text()
Not sure but if you provide me the link I will try

XPath / XQuery: find text in a node, but ignoring content of specific descendant elements

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")]

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