Question

I’m trying to learn xpath by writing a simple program that will list the fixtures of Premier League in footbal from the following page:
http://www.livefootball.com/football/england/premier-league/

I’ve already collected all the dates using the //dl[@class='mElHeaderDet'] statement and all the general match details using //div[@class='mEl show']/dl/*. The problem is however, it seems that every match in that page has it’s own unique ID, for example the first match goes like this:

<dl id="fid1-1228229" class="even">
  <dd class="mElStatus">16:00</dd>
  <dd class="mElO1">Arsenal</dd>
  <dd class="mElScore">v</dd>
  <dd class="mElO2">Sunderland</dd>
</dl>

in this example the fid1-1228229 is what interests me. How would I approach getting a list of all the matches’ IDs?

Thanks

Answer 1

To retrieve list of all ids you can use

//div[@class='mEl show']/dl[not(contains(@class,'mElHeaderDet'))]/@id

Above Xpath will return you list of values of id attribute for divs whose class is not mElHeaderDet.

OR

Alternatively you can use this xpath as well

//div[@class='mEl show']/dl[starts-with(@id,'fid')]/@id

Above XPath will return you list of ids of all the divs whose ID attribute value starts with fid

Hope this helps.