CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#.nethtmlxpath
Vincent Séguin
Vincent Séguin

Reputation: 13

How to select with omitting a specific child using XPath?

I have the following HTML:

<div id="main-body">
    <div id="answerform">
        //  ... a few children here i want
        <form id=mwanser">
        </form>
    </div>
</div>

I want everything in the main-body, except what is in the form tag... (and don't want the form tag itself too)....

I tried with XPath a lot but i didn't succeed.

I'm working with C# and HTMLAgilityPack, maybe there's a way to navigate to the child and delete it instead? The first option for me must be XPath too.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 297

Answers (2)

Kioshiki
Kioshiki

Reputation: 991

I think I have achieved this using this answer:

How to remove elements from xml using xslt with stylesheet and xsltproc?

This is done using plain XSL so I don't know if it will help with HTMLAgilityPack.

Here's the XSL that I used:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" exclude-result-prefixes="msxsl">
    <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>

  <xsl:template match="node()|@*">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="form"/>
</xsl:stylesheet>

EDIT: just had a quick look at the HtmlAgilityPack code and found this that should have worked:

HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlNode node;
node = htmldoc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("//form");
node.ParentNode.RemoveChild(node, false);

but for some reason it only deleted the opening tag.

Upvotes: 1

Emiliano Poggi
Emiliano Poggi

Reputation: 24826

With XPath if you select a node you obtain the node and every descendant in it. What you can do is select the children directly but the unwanted node. Taking your sample as a test, you can write:

"/*/*/*[not(self::form)]"

Upvotes: 0

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