XPath to analyze HTML table

[Achim Domma]

Hi,

I have some HTML code, converted to XML and want to get the content of special table cells. The XML looks like this:

....
<tr>
<td width="200">
<font class="content">Project ID</font>
</td>
<td width="200">
<font class="content">12345</font>
</td>
</tr>
....

I want to get '12345' and tried it with an XPath expression like this:

'//font[starts-with(text,"Project")]/parent/parent/td[2]/font/text

It does not work, but I don't understand why!? Can anybody help?

regards,
Achim

 

[Dimitre Novatchev]

Hi,

I have some HTML code, converted to XML and want to get the content of special table cells. The XML looks like this:

...
<tr>
<td width="200">
<font class="content">Project ID</font>
</td>
<td width="200">
<font class="content">12345</font>
</td>
</tr>
...

I want to get '12345' and tried it with an XPath expression like this:

'//font[starts-with(text,"Project")]/parent/parent/td[2]/font/text

It does not work, but I don't understand why!? Can anybody help?

The reason is that there are no "parent" elements defined in html.

Probably you meant parent::* or simply ".."

I would re-write your XPath expression to something like the following:

//tr[td/font[starts-with(., 'Project')]]/td[2]/font/text[1]

Another recommendation is to download the XPath Visualizer and play with it to learn XPath the fun way.

=====
Cheers,

Dimitre Novatchev.
http://fxsl.sourceforge.net/ -- the home of FXSL