Question

Needing some instructions on Xpath. I have something along the following lines in terms of HTML. How would I extract the table following the first paragraph with an image?

<p align="center">
    <img src="some_image.gif" alt="Some Title">
</p>
<table width="500" border="1" class="textstyle" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
    <tr>
        <td colspan="4" align="center">
            <b>Label</b>
        </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td align="center">
            Text
        </td>
        <td align="center">
            Text
        </td>
        <td align="center">
            Text
        </td>
        <td align="center">
            Text
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>
<blockquote>
    <p class="textstyle">
        Text.
    </p>
</blockquote>

Obviously I’d like to see how to write the xpath for this, however I would further like to understand my options via some kind of an abbreviated list / cheatsheet of what options exist for xpath. I was considering using something along the lines of this:

//table[preceding-sibling::p[contains(align(), "center")

or perhaps something that would allow me to say a p that’s centered with an img in it, however I’m just not sure where to go to get a nice comprehensive list vs an actual writeup that explains all the gory details.

Answer 1

Use:

(//p[img])[1]/following-sibling::table[1]

This selects the table that is the first table – following sibling of the first p in the document that has an img child.

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