CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlobjective-cxmlxpath
Mahir
Mahir

Reputation: 1684

Creating an XPath using the contains() function

For an iOS app, I'm using an open source html parser called Hpple to scrape some data from a web page. The two tags I'm searching for are <td class="menugridcell"> and <td class="menugridcell_last">

I'm trying to create one xpath that searches for either tag. I unsuccessfully tried using the 'contains()' function:

NSString *queryString = @"//td[@class=contains(., 'menugridcell')]"

There should be 27 nodes that match this query, but oddly I was getting 1 (not even 0). I tried several variations, but I can't seem to find the right syntax.

For reference, here is how I searched for them separately

NSString *queryString = @"//td[@class='menugridcell']" (returns 18 nodes)

NSString *queryString2 = @"//td[@class='menugridcell_last']" (returns 9 nodes)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 51

Answers (1)

har07
har07

Reputation: 89285

You can try this way :

//td[contains(@class, 'menugridcell')]

Possible alternatives are using starts-with() as pointed by @pault. in comment :

//td[starts-with(@class, 'menugridcell')]

or using or to select by one of two conditions :

//td[@class='menugridcell' or @class='menugridcell_last']

Anyway, it is a bit surprising to hear that the library you're using doesn't recognize contains() function, because contains() is available since XPath 1.0 spec.

Upvotes: 1

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