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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-30T15:26:31+00:00

How I select everything (all possible nodes) between the 1st and second h2? There

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How I select everything (all possible nodes) between the 1st and second h2? There can be n nodes between them, and there can be m h2 tags.

The nodes aren’t necessarily going to be contained in an HTML elment, so the selector can just grab them all.

<html>
 <h2>asdf</h2>
 <p>good stuff 1</p>
 <p>good stuff 2</p>
 <p>good <a href="#">asdf</a>stuff n...</p>
 <h2>qwer</h2>
 <p>test2</p>
 <h2>dfgh</h2>
 <p>test2</p>
</html>

I’m just getting my feet wet with XPath. Please help my newbie question 🙂

Thanks so much!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    One XPath expression that selects the wanted elements is:

       /*/h2[1]
      /following-sibling::p
        [count(. | /*/h2[2]/preceding-sibling::p)
        =
         count(/*/h2[2]/preceding-sibling::p)
        ]

    In general, in such cases one can use the Kayessian formula for set intersection:

    $ns1[count(.|$ns2) = count($ns2)]

    This XPath expression selects all the nodes that belong both to the nodesets $ns1 and $ns2.

    If you want to get all nodes between two given nodes $n1 and $n2, this is the intersection of two nodesets: $n1/following-sibling::node() and $n2/preceding-sibling::node().

    Just substitute these expression into the Kayessian formula and you have the wanted XPath expression.

    In XPath 2.0, of course, one would use the << or >> operator, something like:

     /*/h2[1]/following-sibling::p[. << /*/h2[1]/]
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