Question

Simplified example

<td>caption</a>
<a id="tt-1">text1</a>
<a id="tt-2">text2</a>
<td>topics</td>
<a id="tt-3">text3</a>
<a id="tt-4">text4</a>
<a id="tt-5">text5</a>

What I need is to match all a elements below <td>topics</td>.
Note that there are plenty of elements between those elements in example. Also <td> may be enclosed into other elements.

My current real-world XPath expression looks like this

//a[contains(@id,'tt-')]

Updated to be closer to real-world

Another update to clarify.

Answer 1

Based on your statement “What I need is to match all a elements below <td>topics</td>“

//td[.='topics']/a

I’m sure that’s not the whole story, though.

Based on your updated example:

//a[starts-with(@id, 'tt-') and preceding-sibling::td[1] = 'topics']