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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-06T10:46:04+00:00

Given an HTML like following: …more html above… <div class=any_name> <p>Element A goes here</p>

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Given an HTML like following:

...more html above...
<div class="any_name">
  <p>Element A goes here</p>
  <p>Element B goes here</p>
</div>
...more html below...

I need to get the xpath route of any element that contains (for example) “A goes” text and get some like:

/html/body/div[4]/div[2]/div/article/div/p

Note that the structure may be different in each case and I need to search through the entire document looking for text every time…

Actually I get the web content succesfully but applying some like this //element[text()=”A goes”] with Web::Scraper seems doesn’t work.

How can I get this xpath routes using content? Any ideas? Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can use XML::Twig to get that. I changed the xpath you provided a little and made it more modular.

    use strict; use warnings;
use feature 'say';
use XML::Twig;
my $twig = XML::Twig->new();
$twig->parse(<<_HTML_
<html><body>
<div class="any_name">
  <p>Element A goes here</p>
  <p>Element B goes here</p>
</div>
</body></html>
_HTML_
);

for my $letter (qw(A B C)) {
  foreach my $t ($twig->get_xpath("//p[string()=~/$letter goes/]")) {
    say $t->xpath;
  }
}

    You can use a regular expression in your xpath to find the elements that match your letter. The one with text()= didn’t work in this case, because XML::Twig matches the complete text if you use = instead of =~ //. Also, the correct syntax is string(), not text().

    The get_xpath method returns a list of elements. I use the xpath method on each of them, which returns the full xpath to the element. In my case that is:

    /html/body/div/p[1]
/html/body/div/p[2]

    There is no match for C because I did not put it in the HTML code.

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