CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xmlxpath
StackOverflowNewbie
StackOverflowNewbie

Reputation: 40633

XPath - how to select text

How do I get The quick brown fox. in the following document:

<a>
   <b>
      Hello
      <c/>
      World
   </b>
   The quick brown fox.
</a>

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2662

Answers (3)

user357812
user357812

Reputation:

As discussed in comments, when dealing with mixed content is important to know whether white space only text nodes are being preserved or stripped.

Universal solution:

/a/text()[normalize-space()][1]

Meaning: first not white space only text node child of a root element

Other posibility:

/a/text()[last()]

Meaning: last text node child of a root element

Upvotes: 4

Yodan Tauber
Yodan Tauber

Reputation: 3967

text() selects all child text nodes of the current node, so /a/text() is the way to go. Just remember that you may need to do some string manipulation on the results, because an XML like this one:

<a>
   <b>
      Hello
      <c/>
      World
   </b>
   The quick <!--comment--> brown fox.
</a>

will return two text nodes ("the quick" and "brown fox"). Also, the text values will contain whitespace (e.g. the newline after </b> and before "the").

Upvotes: 1

mariana soffer
mariana soffer

Reputation: 1853

you can start with /a/text() This will get you just the node texts not the tags.

Upvotes: 0

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