XPath selection by innertext

Question

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?

Answer 1

Have you tried this?

//myparent/mychild[text() = 'foo']

Alternatively, you can use the shortcut for the self axis:

//myparent/mychild[. = 'foo']

Answer 2

Matt said it, but the full solution:

//myparent[mychild='foo']/mychild

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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')]