Question

Code on page:

<div class='container'> 
<p>
    <b>Address:</b> Some address<br />
    <b>Phone:</b> phone1, phone2<br />
    <b>E-mail: </b><a href='mailto:somemail' >somemail</a><br />
    <b>Site:</b><a href='somesite'>somesite</a>
</p>    
</div>

I need to select text after </b> and before <br /> using XPATH.
In this case I would need to get ‘Some address’ or ‘phone1, phone2’ etc.

‘Some address’ needs to be in $var1
‘phone1, phone2’ in $var2

I tried with .//*[@class="container"]/p/text()[1] it didn’t worked.

Answer 1

Try this one

/div[@class="container"]/p/descendant-or-self::text()[
    not(ancestor::b) 
    and normalize-space(.) != ""
]

This will select the text nodes within the P element tree (of the div with the class attribute “container”) that are not within a B element tree or empty, e.g. this would give you

• “Some address”,
• “phone1, phone2”,
• “somemail” and
• “somesite”.

Demo

Also have a look at this XPath tutorial.