ansaurus

Question

HtmlAgilityPack with XPath - retrieve nodes that doesn't contain  

Answer 1

+1 A:

"(td)[(position() >= 10 and position() <= last()) and not(.='&nbsp;')]"

not(.=' ')

tests that the whole text() node is not the string ' '.

You want to use the XPath contains() function:

not(contains(., '&#xA0;'))

Dimitre Novatchev 2010-10-25 17:56:11

Yeah, I was tempted to say that too. However his `td` elements appear to have as their whole text node value... nothing else. So it would be puzzling if this were indeed the problem.

LarsH 2010-10-25 22:17:47

That did the trick! I knew there was a contains() fn but it never crossed my mind to use it because, as LarsH said, all of the td elements _just_ have in them. Thanks anyway! :-)

eth0 2010-10-26 08:43:38

@eth0, in light of this, I suspect your input XML is not what you think it is (i.e. not what you showed above). Extra whitespace may have crept in. What happens when you select `string-length(td[10])`?

LarsH 2010-10-26 10:50:11

Answer 2

A:

I'm trying to retrieve a select amount of elements that doesn't contain the value  

I believe @Dimitre has answered for that specification of the task.

I only want nodes that contain something other than  

A slightly different specification. Does this work? (Edited; thanks to Alejandro.)

"td[position() >= 10 and translate(., '&#xA0;', '') != '']"

This is equivalent and shorter, but less readable:

"td[position() >= 10 and translate(., '&#xA0;', '')]"

Anyway, you found the problem so we won't go farther with this.

Do note, though, that using   literally in XPath won't normally work unless you define it. This character entity is predefined in HTML but not in XML. That's why   or   is more reliable. However, it's possible that the HtmlAgilityPack defines for you.

LarsH 2010-10-25 22:21:53

@LarsH: `fn:position()` result should always be less than or equal to `fn:last()`. Also, the boolean value of a string should be false if it's empty, and true otherwise. So, `td[position() >= 10 and translate(.,'A0;','')]`

Alejandro 2010-10-25 23:12:51

@Alej: Thanks... to be honest I only looked at the part of the predicate related to nbsp. I'll edit my answer.

LarsH 2010-10-26 10:40:32

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

HtmlAgilityPack with XPath - retrieve nodes that doesn't contain

related questions

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

HtmlAgilityPack with XPath - retrieve nodes that doesn't contain &nbsp;

related questions

HtmlAgilityPack with XPath - retrieve nodes that doesn't contain