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!

Answer 1

You can use the text() function. 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()

Answer 2

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.