Question

I have some HTML like this (which I cannot change):

<div>
    <p class="name">
        <span>Employee Name: </span>
        John Smith
    </p>
</div>

And I’d like to use xpath to extract out just the “John Smith” part..

I have been trying to use this code:

//div//p[@class='name']//text()

However, it doesn’t work.

What is the best way to achieve what I’m after?

Many thanks.

Answer 1

You almost have it.

Change your XPath to: //div//p[@class='name']/text()

When you use //text(), it selects all of the descendant text() nodes, which includes the “Employee Name: ” text node that is a child of the <span>.

It is best to avoid the // when possible, as it makes your expressions less efficient and more prone to those sort of issues.