Extracting information from HTML using XPath

Question

I have a snippet of html which I extracted from the source of a webpage I'm working on:

<span itemprop="homeLocation" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Place"><meta itemprop="name" content="Kansas"/>

...and I'd like to extract the location, Kansas from it, using Xpath.

Using an Xpath checker, I have been testing this but to no avail.

I tried

//*[@itemprop="homeLocation"]/meta[@itemprop="name"]/@content

and similar attempts, but can't seem to get a match. I don't understand what I'm doing wrong.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Please provide more context. Also note that the fragment you provided isn't well-formed: itemscope has no value and the span isn't closed. — kjhughes
– kjhughes, Commented Nov 7, 2015 at 23:37
ok I will add more info...also, I agree, itemscope don't have the value, but I didn't write the code and there's nothing I can do to change it... — tumultous_rooster
– tumultous_rooster, Commented Nov 7, 2015 at 23:39
you will not able to use xPathes without having proper xml. You should use external libraries that allow to process invalid xmls. — vvg
– vvg, Commented Nov 7, 2015 at 23:44

vvg · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-07 23:38:39Z

1

Your xPath is absolutely valid. The problems are with xml.

Close span tag.
Set some value for itemscope attribute.

And the most important. xPath checker your are trying to use seems to have some bugs. Check this one: http://www.freeformatter.com/xpath-tester.html#ad-output

Xml I've used:

    <span 
      itemprop="homeLocation"
      itemscope=""
      itemtype="http://schema.org/Place">
             <meta itemprop="name" content="Kansas"/>
  </span>

Result:

Attribute='content="Kansas"'

answered Nov 7, 2015 at 23:38

vvg

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