Question

Viewing source, I have table data formatted exactly like this:

  <tr class="even">
    <td>apple</td>
    <td>pear</td>
    <td>orange</td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="odd">
    <td>apple</td>
    <td>pear</td>
    <td>&nbsp</TD>
    </tr>
  <tr class="even">
    <td>apple</td>
    <td>pear</td>
    <td>orange</td>
    </tr>

How would I go about not matching the <td> containing &nbsp in all rows where it occurs?

Answer 1

The entity   isn’t something that XPath knows about — it is best to use its equivalent (self-defining) character entity  

To select all td s of a top element – table, that do not contain   use:

 /table/tr/td[not(contains(., ' '))]

To select all rows of this table such that none of their td children contains   use:

 /table/tr[not(td[contains(., ' ')])]

To select all td children of all rows of this table such that none of their td children contains   use:

 /table/tr[not(td[contains(., ' ')])]/td