R Xpath to be used to avoid a specific ancestor.

Question

I am working in R to analyze a complex structure of a web, and I want to extract the information that is contained in font tag, but happens to be that the data from tables are as well between font tags.

XPath examples:

text/div/font
table/tbody/tr/td/div/font

Since the structure is very complex, I can not predict the exact Xpath, so I am using //font as xpath to extract relevant data, but since the information in tables are contained as well in tags font, I am getting information that is not relevant for my analysis.

xpathCodefont <- "//font"
htmlCodeFonts <- xpathSApply(htmlCode,xpathCodefont,xmlValue)

Is there any syntax that allow me "to skip" the fonts that are coming from a path with tables? Or in other words, how could I avoid fonts that have table as ancestors (but not as direct parent).

Thanks in advance,

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:27

2

It would have been nice to include a reproducible example so we could test possible solutions, but I think you want

xpathCodefont <- "//font[not(ancestor::table)]"

That should return any font tags that are not inside tables.

edited May 23 '17 at 10:27

Community

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answered Oct 15 '15 at 19:58

MrFlick

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Exactly what I was looking for. Thank you so much, it works. – MariPlaza Oct 15 '15 at 20:10

R Xpath to be used to avoid a specific ancestor.

1 Answers1