Question

I’m using this XPath for getting the text() that follows mailto:

//a[starts-with(@href, 'mailto')]/text()

Now I want to be able to extract what comes after mailto: for such attribute:

<a href="mailto:[e-mail]?subject=hello">here</a>

I want to get: [e-mail]?subject=hello

What XPath should I be using to get the string just after the mailto:?

Edit: seems that the mailto: is being generated using javascript.
Can scrapy handle such thing?

    <script type="text/javascript">
 <!--
 var prefix = '&#109;a' + 'i&#108;' + '&#116;o';
 var path = 'hr' + 'ef' + '=';
 var addy54802 = '&#105;nf&#111;' + '&#64;';
 addy54802 = addy54802 + 'zl&#97;ng&#111;' + '&#46;' + 'c&#111;m?s&#117;bj&#101;ct=C&#97;r&#101;&#101;r%20&#97;t%20Zl&#97;ng&#111;';
 var addy_text54802 = 'here';
 document.write('<a ' + path + '\'' + prefix + ':' + addy54802 + '\'>');
 document.write(addy_text54802);
 document.write('<\/a>');
 //-->\n </script>

Solution: I think I should be using Selenium for javascript.

Answer 1

Consider below sample XML, for fetching string after mailto:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<div>
    <a href="mailto:[e-mail]?subject=hello">here</a>
</div>

you can use below xpath expression

substring-after(/div/a/@href,'mailto:')

it returns [e-mail]?subject=hello

In your case xpath will look like:

substring-after(//a[starts-with(@href, 'mailto')]/@href,'mailto:')