XPath - find first occurance of string

Question

I'm trying to select an anchor element by first containing the text "To Be Coded", then extracting a number from a string using substring, then using the greater than comparison operator (>0). This is what I have thus far:

/a[number(substring(text(),???,string-length()-1))>0]

An example of the HTML is:

<a class="" href="javascript:submitRequest('getRec','30', '63', 'Z')"> To Be Coded&nbsp;&nbsp;(23) </a>

My issue right now is I don't know how to find the first occurrence of the open parenthesis. I'm also not sure how to combine what I have with the contains(text(),"To Be Coded") function.

So my criteria for the selection is:

Must be an anchor element
Must include the text "To Be Coded"
Must contain a number greater than 0 in the parentheses

Edit: I suppose I could just "hard code" the starting position for the substring, but I'm not sure what that would be - will XPath count the white space before the text in the element? How would it handle/count the   characters?

I think it's 1.0 - the XPath is for selenium/firefox.

jreed121
– jreed121

2011-10-24 20:03:40 +00:00
Commented Oct 24, 2011 at 20:03 — jreed121
– jreed121, Commented Oct 24, 2011 at 20:03

FailedDev · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-24 20:23:13Z

2

Here try this :

a[contains(., 'To Be Coded') and number(substring-before(substring-after(., '('), ')')) > 0]

answered Oct 24, 2011 at 20:23

FailedDev

27k9 gold badges56 silver badges74 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

1 Comment

FailedDev Over a year ago

No problem. Note that this will fail if the content of the anchor has more than one parentheses.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

XPath - find first occurance of string

1 Answer 1

1 Comment

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

1 Comment

Related