Select Nth child Node in HTML Document

Question

I have an html document that I need to grab all table elements that are the 5th table deep in the DOM, not to be confused with the 5th child table. My problem is this 5 table deep structure could be wrapped in any number of div elements so I can't use an absolute path such as

/html/body/table/tbody/tr/td/table/tbody/tr/td/table/tbody/tr/td/table/tbody/tr/td/table

For example:

<body>    
    <table>    
        <table>
            <table>
                <table>
                   <!--Grab this one -->
                   <table>
                   </table>
                </table>
            </table>
       </table>
    </table>
</body>

Or This:

 <body> 
    <div> <!--Could be wrapped more than just once though -->  
        <table>    
            <table>
                <table>
                    <table>
                       <!--Grab this one -->
                       <table>
                       </table>
                    </table>
                </table>
           </table>
        </table>
    </div>
</body>

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 21 '12 at 20:37

4

Use:

(//table[count(ancestor::table) = 4])[1]

This selects the first table in the document that has exactly four ancestors named table .

answered Nov 21 '12 at 20:37

Dimitre Novatchev

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score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 21 '12 at 20:04

3

I believe you'd want the // expression between each element, making the full expression:

//table//table//table//table//table

This will select any table that has 4 tables anywhere in its path

answered Nov 21 '12 at 20:04

Thymine

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2
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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 21 '12 at 20:13

1

XElement doc = XElement.Parse(yourXml); 
var requiredTable = doc.Descendants("table").ElementAt(4);

answered Nov 21 '12 at 20:13

Dmitry Khryukin

6,408
7
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score 1 · Answer 4 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:51

1

for mshtml (because you question is c# and html tagged) the way to access a html childnode element is something like mentioned here: How can I retrieve all the text nodes of a HTMLDocument in the fastest way in C#?

maybe this helps!

edited May 23 '17 at 11:51

Community

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1

answered Nov 15 '13 at 17:35

Zameer Ansari

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Select Nth child Node in HTML Document

4 Answers4