string()
works great on a certain webpage I am trying to extract text from.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=lemons&first=111&FORM=PERE
has similar structure. For bing, the xpath I have tried is
string(//h3/a)
which works great to get the search results, even with strong tags etc, but only returns the first result. Is there something like strings(), so I can get the full text of each
//h3/a
result?
Is there something like strings(), so I can get the full text of each
//h3/aresult?
No, Not in XPath 1.0.
From the W3C XPath 1.0 Specification (the only normative document about XPath 1.0):
"Function: string string(object?)
The string function converts an object to a string as follows:
A node-set is converted to a string by returning the string-value of the node in the node-set that is first in document order."
So, if you only have an XPath 1.0 engine available, you need to select the node-set of all //h3/a elements and then in your programming language that is hosting XPath, to iterate on each node and get its string value separately.
In XPath 2.0 use:
//h3/a/string()
The result of evaluating this XPath 2.0 expression is a sequence of strings, each of which is the string value of one of the//h3/a elements.
The MSDN documentation of string remarks that:
The
string()function converts a node-set to a string by returning the string value of the first node in the node-set, which in some instances may yield unexpected results.
This sounds like what you are experiencing. Why are you using string() at all?
Use //h3/a/text()
