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Answer 1

+2 A:

You can use the following XPath Query

$xpath->query("//*[text()='bar']");

or

$xpath->query("//*[.='bar']");

Note using the "//" will slow things down, the bigger you XML file is.

null 2009-08-11 00:07:39

Thanks but this does not work, it prints: "strong" whilst it should prints "strong" and "title" because the word "bar" is in the title as well

ahmed 2009-08-12 02:05:38

I thought you just wanted to match just "bar" now I see you want it to match "bar" or "this bar now" but *not* "this foobar now".

null 2009-08-12 17:23:56

Answer 2

A:

You can use matches and a regex instead of contains and a string, like so

$xpath->query('//*[matches(child::text(),"(^| )bar( |$)")]')

Jory 2009-08-11 17:58:46

thanks but is an error and I think we should use contains because we are searching for the container of the text not the text itself

ahmed 2009-08-12 02:07:10

Answer 3

A:

If you are looking for just "bar" with XPath 1.0 then you'll have to use a combo of functions, there are no regular expressions in XPath 1.0.

$xpath->query("//*[
                starts-with(., 'bar') or 
                contains(., ' bar ') or  
                ('bar' = substring(.,string-length(.)-string-length('bar')+1))
              ]");

Basically this is saying locate strings that start-with 'bar' or contains ' bar ' (notice the spaces before and after) or ends-with 'bar' (notice that ends-with is an XPath 2.0 function, so I substituted code which emulates that function from a previous Stackoverflow Answer.)

if the contains ' bar ' is not enough, because you may have "one bar, over" or "This bar. That bar." where you may have other punctuation after the 'bar'. You could try this contains instead:

contains(translate(., '.,[]', ' '), ' bar ') or

That translates any '.,[]' to a ' ' (single space)... so "one bar, over" becomes "one bar over", thus would match " bar " as expected.

null 2009-08-12 17:55:10

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