CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#xpath
Tommz
Tommz

Reputation: 3453

How to select nodes in XPath which have some attribute?

I want to select nodes which have attribute class with some value not specifying tag.

How to do it?

So far I have: 

html.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//[@class='value']");

But it's not working good as far as I see it.

For instance, let me have this kind of HTML code:

<div>
  <div class="value"></div>
  <a class="value"></div>
</div>

it would need to give me back those 2 elements inside of <div>, so <div> and <a>. Is that possible?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 219

Answers (3)

JLRishe
JLRishe

Reputation: 101652

Because you're working with HTML class attributes here, I suggest using the following:

//*[contains(concat(' ', @class, ' '), ' value ')]

Note the spaces surrounding the value. This will ensure that you find the elements even if they have multiple classes. Simply using @class='value' would not work in that situation.

Upvotes: 1

Mike Perrenoud
Mike Perrenoud

Reputation: 67898

So I believe the correct syntax for what you want is this:

html.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//*[@class='value']");

When you're looking for just the attribute you don't need the [ ] because you're not refining it by element.

Upvotes: 3

Heath
Heath

Reputation: 3292

If you want to include the root node, you can use the descendant-or-self access like so:

descendant-or-self::*[@class='value']

Eliminate -or-self if you don't want to consider the root node. More importantly, the asterisk is what is telling the XPath parser to return a node set.

Upvotes: 2

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