Question

I am doing some screen scraping with a library that takes XPath expressions and noticed that several pages are similar, but different.

Is there a way to loosely say “get me divs that have class=’mytarget’ but exist as a child of a div with class = ‘nav’ and the exact path is unknown between nav and mytarget.”

<div class="nav">

<div>

??????

<div class="mytarget"></div>

??????

</div>

</div>

Answer 1

Yes, using the descendant-or-self axis (//):

//div[@class='nav']//div[@class='mytarget']

Or, if there can be more than one class name on those elements, then this is even better:

//div[contains(concat(' ', @class, ' '), ' nav ')]//
      div[contains(concat(' ', @class, ' '), ' mytarget ')]

Warning: this can be very inefficient on large documents. You should use absolute paths wherever the structure is known. Only resort to // when the structure is unknown.