Question

The HTML you see below is text I have scraped from a remote site, as-is, into a local variable.

Now I need to parse the authorName and bookTitle from the HTML tags into their own variables, given the following consistent format of the scraped text:

<p>
  William Faulkner - 'Light In August'
  <br/>
  William Faulkner - 'Sanctuary'
  <br/>
  William Faulkner - 'The Sound and the Fury'
</p>

Is it possible to do this in XPath?

Answer 1

Yes. And easy, too:

//p/text()

Will give you three separate text nodes:

"
  William Faulkner - 'Light In August'
  ",
"
  William Faulkner - 'Sanctuary'
  ",
"
  William Faulkner - 'The Sound and the Fury'
"

Remember that preceding and trailing whitespace (including any line breaks) is always part of the text node. Trim the result.

I take it that you do not need help with splitting the resulting strings into author and title.