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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T10:06:15+00:00

<TD colSpan=4> Ref. : XYZ</TD> I am trying to retrieve the value XYZ using

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  <TD colSpan=4> Ref. : XYZ</TD>

I am trying to retrieve the value XYZ using XPATH

  //td[text()=" Ref. :"]

But i am unable to get that … can anyone find the error ..

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Try

    substring-after(//TD[starts-with(text(),' Ref. :')]/text(),' Ref. : ')

    That yields

    XYZ

    Update

    Following Alejandro’s remark about listing several nodes, here is a Java example of listing several TDs in Java (standard JDK Java parser).

    import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathConstants;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathExpression;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactory;

import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;

public class TestXPath {

    private static final String FILE = "a.xhtml" ;
    private static final String XPATH = "//td[starts-with(.,'Ref. :')]";
    public static void main(String[] args) {

        DocumentBuilderFactory docFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
        docFactory.setNamespaceAware(true);
        DocumentBuilder builder;
        try {
            builder = docFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
            Document doc = builder.parse(FILE);
            XPathExpression expr = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath().compile(XPATH);
            Object hits = expr.evaluate(doc, XPathConstants.NODESET ) ;
            if ( hits instanceof NodeList ) {
                NodeList list = (NodeList) hits ;
                for (int i = 0; i < list.getLength(); i++ ) {
                    System.out.println( list.item(i).getTextContent().substring( " Ref. :".length() ) );
                }
            }
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

    Applied to the following test xhtml file

    <html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
    <table>
        <thead>
            <tr>
                <td>col1</td>
                <td>col2</td>
                <td>col3</td>
                <td>col4</td>
            </tr>
        </thead>
        <tbody>
            <tr>
                <td colSpan="4">Ref. : Line 1</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
                <td colSpan="4">Ref. : Line 2</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
                <td colSpan="4">Ref. : Line 3</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
                <td colSpan="4">Ref. : Line 4</td>
            </tr>
        </tbody>
    </table>
</body>
</html>

    It yields 

     Line 1
 Line 2
 Line 3
 Line 4
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