Question

Suppose I have html like this:

<div id="wrap">
  <div id="content"> 
    <span>some content</span>
    <div id="s1">
     <p> some text </p>
    </div>
    <h2 id="sec1">
      <span> some text </span>
      <p> some text </p>
    </h2>
    <h2 id="sec1">
      <span> some text </span>
      <div> some more text </div> 
      <p> some text </p>
    </h2>
    <h2 id="sec2">
      <span> do not select me some text </span>
      <div> do not select me some more text </div> 
      <p> do not select me some text </p>
    </h2>
    <h2 id="sec3">
      <span> do not select me some text </span>
      <div> do not select me some more text </div> 
      <p> do not select me some text </p>
    </h2>
   </div>
 </div>

What is the XPath expression that selects all text node except those that are under h2 id=sec2 and h2 id=sec3 ?

Answer 1

Literally, “all text node except those that are under h2 id=sec2 and h2 id=sec3”:

//text()[not(ancestor::h2[@id='sec2' or @id='sec3'])]

However I suspect that you don’t really want that, because you would be losing the <span> and <p> structure. Would it be correct to infer that you want to select all the child elements of the content <div>, except for the <h2>s whose id’s are sec2 and sec3? If so,

/div/div[@id = 'content']/*[not(self::h2 and (@id = 'sec2' or @id = 'sec3'))]

But you should also be aware that the text content of the <h2> element is merely the title of a section, not the whole text of the section. So it looks like by putting div’s and p’s inside an h2, you are not using it the way it is designed.