Question

I have a malformed page to scrape, and have had a hard time getting the correct XPath for YQL. I can scrape individual fields that I need using, for example:

//*[@id="cell_12345"]

But what I really need to do is return all elements who’s ID begins with cell_. Something like:

//*[@id="cell_"*]

How do I do this?

Also, if anybody can point me to a good XPath reference it would be very helpful.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Something like

//*[starts-with(@id, 'ceil_')]

should do nicely.

As for an xpath reference, once you know the syntax and the axis, just any old function reference should help. This was the first one google: http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/xpath_functions.asp