Question

I have those two RxPaths which I need to be written in one expresion:

/td[2]/a[1]/tag[1]

and

/td[2]/a[1]

So basically I need to select path with ‘tag’ element if exists, if not than to select ‘a’ element.
something like:

if exist /td[2]/a[1]/tag[1] select /td[2]/a[1]/tag[1]
else select /td[2]/a[1]

Those elements need to have innertext attribute with some value in them, so I tried:

/td[2]/descendant::node()[@innertext!='']

but it won’t work…

Also those elements are at the bottom of hierarchy so if is there any way to just select first element at lowest level.

I managed to solve this with an regex at the end of my Xpath expression.

/dom/body/div[@id='isc_0']/div/div[@id='isc_B']/div[@id='isc_C']/div[@id='isc_10']/div/div/iframe/body/table/tbody/tr/td[1]/a[@innertext='any uri item']/../../td[2]/*[@innertext~'[^ ]+']

Sorry for misunderstanding with problem…

Regards,

Vajda Vladimir

Answer 1

So basically I need to select path
with ‘tag’ element if exists, if not
than to select ‘a’ element. something
like:

if exist

  /td[2]/a[1]/tag[1] 

select

 /td[2]/a[1]/tag[1] 

else select

  /td[2]/a[1] 

---

I highly doubt that the top element of the document is a td. Don’t use /td — it means you want to select the top element of the document and this top element must be a td .

Also, /td[2] never selects anything, because a (wellformed) XML document has exactly one top element.

Use:

  someParentElement/td[2]/a[1]/tag[1] 
| 
  someParentElement/td[2]/a[1][not(someParentElement/td[2]/a[1]/tag[1])]

---

Those elements need to have innertext
attribute with some value in them

Use:

  someParentElement/td[2][.//@innertext[normalize-space()]]/a[1]/tag[1] 
| 
  someParentElement/td[2]
              [.//@innertext[normalize-space()]]/a[1]
                  [not(someParentElement/td[2]
                       [.//@innertext[normalize-space()]]/a[1]/tag[1])]

---

Also those elements are at the bottom
of hierarchy so if is there any way to
just select first element at lowest
level.

This is not clear. Please, clarify.

All “leaf” elements can be selected using the following XPath expression:

//*[not(*)]

The elements selected don’t have any children-elements, but may have other children (such as text-nodes, PIs, comments) and attributes.