Question

below is the chunk of XML i get as input and i need to select the phone number found in the (732) 462-13112 node if the span in this sample code fed.com is empty.

i am starting off with xpath to ferret out the only certainty i see in the XML and that is “//nobr” how can i navigate down to the span containing ted.com and test to see if there is anything present?

<div> 
    <div></div>
    <span class="pp-headline-item pp-headline-phone"> 
        <span class="telephone" dir="ltr"> 
            <nobr>[phone]</nobr> 
            <span class="pp-headline-phone-label" style="display:none">()</span>
        </span>&#8206;
    </span>  
    <span> &middot; </span> 
    <span class="pp-headline-item pp-headline-authority-page"> 
        <span>
            <a href="http://maps.google.com/local_url?q=http://www.federicis.com/&amp;dq=07746+pizza">
                <span>fed.com</span>
            </a>
        </span> 
    </span>  
</div>

Answer 1

If I understand your question correctly, you can use the following:

/div[//a//span[not(text())]]//nobr/text()

This will return the phone number found in nobr if the span containing fed.com is empty, otherwise it will return an empty string.

Edit:

If you have multiple a tags under the main div, you can use this to extract the specific span:

//a//span[@class='pp-headline-item pp-headline-authority-page']//a/span[not(text())]