I'm trying to extract an element with a particular innertext from a parsed XML document. I know that I can select an element that has a child with a particular innertext using //myparent[mychild='foo'], but I actually just want to select the "mychild" element in this example.
<myparent>
<mychild>
foo
</mychild>
</myparent>
What would be the XPath query for "foo" that would return the "mychild" node?
Have you tried this?
//myparent/mychild[text() = 'foo']
Alternatively, you can use the shortcut for the self axis:
//myparent/mychild[. = 'foo']
You might consider using the contains function to return true/false if the test was found like so:
//mychild[contains(text(),'foo')]
See XSLT, XPath, and XQuery Functions for functions reference
//h3[contains(text(),"In This Week’s Podcast")] found element and //h3[text()="In This Week’s Podcast"] did not; I only tested it on Chrome.
Matt said it, but the full solution:
//myparent[mychild='foo']/mychild
As per the HTML:
<myparent>
<mychild>
foo
</mychild>
</myparent>
The <mychild> element with text as foo is within it's parent <myparent> tag and the text contains leading and trailing white space characters.
So to select the <mychild> element you can use either of the following solutions:
Using normalize-space():
//myparent/mychild[normalize-space()='foo']
Using contains():
//myparent/mychild[contains(., 'foo')]
Ignoring the parent <myparent> tag you can also use:
Using normalize-space():
//mychild[normalize-space()='foo']
Using contains():
//mychild[contains(., 'foo')]
