How to get Atomic Value between Element Nodes using XPath

Question

I want to select only the atomic values inside a node. For example, the "here" text in the following:

<a href="">here</a>

When I use Xpath in Java, it returns some sort of object/array, such as

[DomNode[<a href="">here</a>]]

I just want the text only.

Is this possible, and how? Thanks!

Good question (+1). See my answer for a correct XPath expression that selects the wanted text nodes. — Dimitre Novatchev, Jul 22 '10 at 18:52

maerics · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-22T17:23:23.427

5

You can use the text() node test. For example, if you want to select the text of all anchors with an href attribute you could do the following XPath query:

//*/a/@href/../text()

edited Aug 22 '13 at 17:23

answered Jul 22 '10 at 18:07

maerics

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`text()` is not a function. It is a node test. – Dimitre Novatchev Jul 22 '10 at 18:48

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 22 '10 at 18:50

0

Use:

//a[@href='']/text()

This selects all text nodes that are children of any a element in the document, that has an empty href attribute.

answered Jul 22 '10 at 18:50

Dimitre Novatchev

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How to get Atomic Value between Element Nodes using XPath

2 Answers2