I have this HTML:
<tr class="even expanded first>
<td class="score-time status">
<a href="/matches/2012/08/02/europe/uefa-cup/">
16 : 00
</a>
</td>
</tr>
I want to extract the (16 : 00) string without the extra whitespace. Is this possible?
I. Use this single XPath expression:
translate(normalize-space(/tr/td/a), ' ', '')
Explanation:
normalize-space() produces a new string from its argument, in which any leading or trailing white-space (space, tab, NL or CR characters) is deleted and any intermediary white-space is replaced by a single space character. translate() takes the result produced by normalize-space() and produces a new string in which each of the remaining intermediary spaces is replaced by the empty string.
II. Alternatively:
translate(/tr/td/a, ' 	 
', '')
Please try the below xpath expression :
//td[@class='score-time status']/a[normalize-space() = '16 : 00']
I came across this thread when I was having my own issue similar to above.
HTML
<div class="d-flex">
<h4 class="flex-auto min-width-0 pr-2 pb-1 commit-title">
<a href="/nsomar/OAStackView/releases/tag/1.0.1">
1.0.1
</a>
XPath start command
tree.xpath('//div[@class="d-flex"]/h4/a/text()')
However this grabbed random whitespace and gave me the output of:
['\n ', '\n 1.0.1\n ']
Using normalize-space, it removed the first blank space node and left me with just what I wanted
tree.xpath('//div[@class="d-flex"]/h4/a/text()[normalize-space()]')
['\n 1.0.1\n ']
I could then grab the first element of the list, and use strip() to remove any further whitespace
XPath final command
tree.xpath('//div[@class="d-flex"]/h4/a/text()[normalize-space()]')[0].strip()
Which left me with exactly what I required:
1.0.1
you can check if text() nodes are empty. /path/text()[not(.='')]
it may be useful with axes like following-sibling:: if these are no containers, or with child::.
you can use string() or the regex() function of xpath 2.
NOTE: some comments say that xpath cannot do string manipulation... even if it's not really designed for that you can do basic things: contains(), starts-with(), replace().
if you want to check whitespace nodes it's much harder, as you will generally have a nodelist result set, and most xpath functions, like match or replace, only operate one node.
you can separate node and string manipulation
So you may use xpath to retrieve a container, or a list of text nodes, and then process it with another language. (java, php, python, perl for instance).
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