Simultaneously escape double and single quotes in Xpath

Question

Similar to How to deal with single quote in xpath, I want to escape single quotes. The difference is that I can\'t exclude the possibility that a double quote might also app

Answer 1

I added the cat function to the target inside the html_nodes() function call. Seems to handle both the cases. cat() also has the side-effect of printing the escaped text.

library(rvest)
library(magrittr)

html <- "
1
Father's son
"
target <- "Father's son"
html %>% xml2::read_html() %>% html_nodes(xpath = paste0("//*[contains(text(), \"",cat(target),"\")]"))
#> Father's son
#> {xml_nodeset (4)}
#> [1] \n
1
\n
Father's son
\n
#> [2] \n
1
\n
Father's son
\n
#> [3] 
1
\n
#> [4] 
Father's son

html <- "
1
Father said \"Hello!\"
"
target <- 'Father said "Hello!"'
html %>% xml2::read_html() %>% html_nodes(xpath = paste0("//*[contains(text(), \"",cat(target),"\")]"))
#> Father said "Hello!"
#> {xml_nodeset (4)}
#> [1] \n
1
\n
Father said "Hello!"
\n ...
#> [2] \n
1
\n
Father said "Hello!"
\n
#> [3] 
1
\n
#> [4] 
Father said "Hello!"