Question

I have a document which when simplified looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<document>
    <br/>
    <div class="Heading">Introduction</div>
    <div class="Text">Sed quis malesuada ligula. Aliquam eu felis nulla, ac tempus purus.</div>
    <br/>
    <div class="Heading">Background</div>
    <div class="Text">Curabitur adipiscing tortor ipsum. In gravida congue tincidunt. Aliquam</div>
    <br/>
    <div class="Heading">Summary</div>
    <div class="Text">Pellentesque consequat scelerisque urna, sit amet consequat quam lacinia ac.</div>
    <br/>
</document>

What I would like to do is obtain the text of the introduction: “Sed …. puris.”, so what I need is an xpath expression something like this:

(//div[@class=”Text”])[0]/following-sibling::node(0)

Clearly this is rubbish; what I’m looking for is some expression that means “select the text of the div node that has a class of Text where the previous div node has a class of heading and the text of the previous node is Introduction”.

I’m thinking about LINQ to Xml as well.

What XPath expression will do this?

Answer 1

I think this might do it:

//div
  [@class='Text']
  [preceding-sibling::div
    [@class='Heading'
     and text() = 'Introduction']
  ]

Works for me in testing. Let me explain it. Comments begin with #.

# Select all divs
//div 
  # With class 'Text'
  [@class='Text']
  # Whose preceding div sibling
  [preceding-sibling::div
    # Has the class 'Heading'
    [@class='Heading'
    # Contains the text 'Introduction'
    and text() = 'Introduction']
  ]