Question

I’m trying to select elements (a) with XPath 1.0 (or possibly could be with Regex) that are following siblings of particular element (b) but only preceed another b element.

<img><b>First</b><br>&nbsp;&nbsp;
<img>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="/first-href">First Href</a> - 19:30<br>
<img><b>Second</b><br>&nbsp;&nbsp;
<img>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="/second-href">Second Href</a> - 19:30<br>
<img>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="/third-href">Third Href</a> - 19:30<br>

I tried to make the sample as close to real world as possible. So in this scenario when I’m at element

<b>First</b>

I need to select

<a href="/first-href">First Href</a> 

and when I’m at

<b>Second</b> 

I need to select

<a href="/second-href">Second Href</a> 
<a href="/third-href">Third Href</a>

Any idea how to achieve that? Thank you!

Answer 1

Dynamically create this XPath:

following-sibling::a[preceding-sibling::b[1][.='xxxx']]

where ‘xxxx’ is the replaced with the text of the current <b>.

This is assuming that all the elements actually are siblings. If they are not, you can try to work with the preceding and following axes, or you write a more specific XPath that better resembles document structure.

In XSLT you could also use:

following-sibling::a[
  generate-id(preceding-sibling::b[1]) = generate-id(current())
]