XPath wildcard in attribute value

Question

I have the following XPath to match attributes of the class span:

//span[@class='amount']

I want to match all elements that have the class attribute of "amount" but also may have other classes as well. I thought I could do this:

//span[@class='*amount*']

but that doesn't work...how can I do this?

score 48 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '20 at 18:23

48

Use the following expression:

//span[contains(concat(' ', @class, ' '), ' amount ')]

You could use contains on its own, but that would also match classes like someamount. Test the above expression on the following input:

<root>
  <span class="test amount blah"/>
  <span class="amount test"/>
  <span class="test amount"/>
  <span class="amount"/>
  <span class="someamount"/>
</root>

It will select the first four span elements, but not the last one.

edited Apr 13 '20 at 18:23

T.S.

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answered Dec 23 '11 at 19:32

Wayne

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If suppose, I want to retrieve the text content inside the span tag then what will be the code. I have stored the result in nodelist and tried to print the content using nodelist.item(0).getFirstChild().getNodeValue(). But this doesn't return anything. Please help me out. – TheGaME Nov 04 '14 at 17:15
Interesting how a total of four (2 x 2) blanks are needed. – Dan Jacobson Nov 01 '20 at 21:32

score 26 · Answer 2 · edited May 24 '18 at 17:01

26

You need to use contains method. See How to use XPath contains() here?

//span[contains(@class,'amount')]

edited May 24 '18 at 17:01

Ashley Tate

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answered Dec 23 '11 at 19:31

Alexei Levenkov

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9

Unfortunately, that will also match `class="lookamountain"`. @lwburk has the right answer. – Ross Patterson Dec 23 '11 at 23:48

XPath wildcard in attribute value

2 Answers2