Question

<p>
<p>
<h2>
<p>
<ul>
<p>and two special regions:</p>
<ul>
<h2>
     <span class="editsection">
     <span id="History" class="mw-headline">History</span>
</h2>
<div class="thumb tleft">
<p>
<p>
<h3>
<p>
<div class="thumb tright">
<div class="thumb tright">
<p>
<p>
<h3>
<p>
<h3>
<div class="thumb tright">
<p>
<p>
<p>
<p>
<p>
<p>
<h3>
<p>
<h2>
     <span class="editsection">
     <span id="Demography" class="mw-headline">Demography</span>
</h2>
<div class="thumb tright">
<p>
<div class="thumb tright">
<p>
<table class="wikitable sortable jquery-tablesorter">
<p>
<p>
<p>

How to count the number of <P> tags in between two <h2> tags?

Start with tag

<h2>
     <span class="editsection">
     <span id="History" class="mw-headline">History</span>
</h2>

and

<h2>
     <span class="editsection">
     <span id="Demography" class="mw-headline">Demography</span>
</h2>

the xpath should retreive 13 <p> tags between these two <h2> tag. So how to do write xpath for this?

Note: Tags <p> <h2> <h3> <ul> <div> are siblings.

<p> tags and <h2> tags does’t contain any of the attribute.

Answer 1

This one should work for you:

count(//p[preceding-sibling::h2[./span[@id='History']] and following-sibling::h2[./span[@id='Demography']]])

You can test it with the following transformation:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:transform version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:value-of select="count(//p[preceding-sibling::h2[./span[@id='History']] and following-sibling::h2[./span[@id='Demography']]])" />
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:transform>