Question

I’m trying to scrape a span element that has mixed content

<span id="span-id">
  <!--starts with some whitespace-->
  <b>bold title</b>
  <br/>
  text here that I want to grab....
</span>

And here’s a code snippet of a grab that identifies the span. It picks it up without a problem but the text field of the webelement is blank.

IWebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://page-to-examine.com");
var query = driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//span[@id='span-id']"));

I’ve tried adding /text() to the expression which also returns nothing. If I add /b I do get the text content of the bolded text – which happens to be a title that I’m not interested in.

I’m sure with a bit of xpath magic this should be easy but I’m not finding it so far!! Or is there a better way? Any comments gratefully received.

Answer 1

I’ve tried adding /text() to the expression which also returns nothing

This selects all the text-node-children of the context node — and there are three of them.

What you refer to “nothing” is most probably the first of these, which is a white-space-only text node (thus you see “nothing” in it).

What you need is:

//span[@id='span-id']/text()[3] 

Of course, there are other variations possible:

//span[@id='span-id']/text()[last()] 

Or:

//span[@id='span-id']/br/following-sibling::text()[1] 

XSLT-based verification:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>

 <xsl:template match="node()|@*">
     "<xsl:copy-of select="//span[@id='span-id']/text()[3]"/>"
 </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

This transformation simply outputs whatever the XPath expression selects. When applied on the provided XML document (comment removed):

<span id="span-id">
    <b>bold title</b>
    <br/>
    text here that I want to grab....   
</span>

the wanted result is produced:

     "
    text here that I want to grab....   
"