22

Can anyone please suggest an XPath expression format that returns a string value containing the concatenated values of certain qualifying child nodes of an element, but ignoring others:

<div>
    This text node should be returned.
    <em>And the value of this element.</em>
    And this.
    <p>But this paragraph element should be ignored.</p>
</div>

The returned value should be a single string:

This text node should be returned. And the value of this element. And this.

Is this possible in a single XPath expression?

Thanks.

Tim Coulter
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7 Answers7

29

In XPath 2.0 :

string-join(/*/node()[not(self::p)], '')

Dimitre Novatchev
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  • But nested function is not supported in string-join() like string-join(normalize-space(//a[@class="title"]//text())) – Learner Oct 13 '15 at 06:41
  • @SIslam, It is not a "nested function" problem, but just that `normalize-space()` takes a single argument -- not a sequence. You can use this expression instead: `string-join(//a[@class='title']/normalize-space())` . Of course, you must add a second argument to the call of `string-join()` – Dimitre Novatchev Oct 14 '15 at 02:59
20

In XPath 1.0:

You can use

/div//text()[not(parent::p)]

to capture the wanted text nodes. The concatenation itself cannot be done in XPath 1.0, I recommend doing it in the host application.

Tomalak
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    Thanks - you're absoluately right. I just read the XPath reference and discovered that all string functions implicitly work on the first node in a node-set, so there's consequently no way to combine selection and concatenation. – Tim Coulter Sep 10 '09 at 10:02
  • Lovely and elegant. Good on you! – Aaron Feb 04 '12 at 06:49
6

This look that works:

Using as context /div/:

text() | em/text()

Or without the use of context:

/div/text() | /div/em/text()

If you want to concat the first two strings, use this:

concat(/div/text(), /div/em/text())
kenorb
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Guillermo
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    Thanks. This is a good step in the right direction. But I can't see how to concatenate the results. When I wrap this in a call to the string() function, it only returns the value of the first selected node. – Tim Coulter Sep 10 '09 at 08:25
  • Yes, and, as you could see, my solution does the same as the "correct" solution.. ¬¬ You can concat(...) nodes, but, you wont see the third "text". Try this: concat(/div/text(), /div/em/text()) – Guillermo Sep 10 '09 at 10:17
6
/div//text()

double slash forces to extract text regardless of intermediate nodes

Dewfy
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0

If you want all children except p, you can try the following...

    string-join(//*[name() != 'p']/text(), "")

which returns...

This text node should be returned.
And the value of this element.
And this.
Rodney P. Barbati
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0

I know this comes a bit late, but I figure my answer could still be relevant. I recently ran into a similar problem. And because I use scrapy in Python 3.6, which does not support xpath 2.0, I could not use the string-join function suggested in several online answers.

I ended up finding a simple workaround (as shown below) which I did not see in any of the stackoverflow answers, that's why I'm sharing it.

temp_selector_list = response.xpath('/div')
string_result = [''.join(x.xpath(".//text()").extract()) for x in temp_selector_list]

Hope this helps!

Chiraz BenAbdelkader
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-2

You could use a for-each loop as well and assemble the values in a variable like this

<xsl:variable name="newstring">
    <xsl:for-each select="/div//text()">
      <xsl:value-of select="."/>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </xsl:variable>
user2406081
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