How get xpath route from text excerpt

Question

Given an HTML like following:

...more html above...
<div class="any_name">
  <p>Element A goes here</p>
  <p>Element B goes here</p>
</div>
...more html below...

I need to get the xpath route of any element that contains (for example) "A goes" text and get some like:

/html/body/div[4]/div[2]/div/article/div/p

Note that the structure may be different in each case and I need to search through the entire document looking for text every time...

Actually I get the web content succesfully but applying some like this //element[text()="A goes"] with Web::Scraper seems doesn't work.

How can I get this xpath routes using content? Any ideas? Thanks!

You may want to see this answer: http://stackoverflow.com/a/4747858/36305 — Dimitre Novatchev, Jun 25 '12 at 13:18

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 25 '12 at 10:56

You can use XML::Twig to get that. I changed the xpath you provided a little and made it more modular.

use strict; use warnings;
use feature 'say';
use XML::Twig;
my $twig = XML::Twig->new();
$twig->parse(<<_HTML_
<html><body>
<div class="any_name">
  <p>Element A goes here</p>
  <p>Element B goes here</p>
</div>
</body></html>
_HTML_
);

for my $letter (qw(A B C)) {
  foreach my $t ($twig->get_xpath("//p[string()=~/$letter goes/]")) {
    say $t->xpath;
  }
}

You can use a regular expression in your xpath to find the elements that match your letter. The one with text()= didn't work in this case, because XML::Twig matches the complete text if you use = instead of =~ //. Also, the correct syntax is string(), not text().

The get_xpath method returns a list of elements. I use the xpath method on each of them, which returns the full xpath to the element. In my case that is:

/html/body/div/p[1]
/html/body/div/p[2]

There is no match for C because I did not put it in the HTML code.

How get xpath route from text excerpt

1 Answers1