How to search for content in XPath in multiline text using Python?

Question

When I search for the existence of data in text() of an element using contains, it works for plain data but not when there are carriage returns, new lines/tags in the elemen

Answer 1

Use:

//td[text()[contains(.,'Good bye')]]

Explanation:

The reason for the problem is not that a text node's string value is a multiline string -- the real reason is that the td element has more than one text-node children.

In the provided expression:

//td[contains(text(),"Good bye")]

the first argument passed to the function contains() is a node-set of more than one text nodes.

As per XPath 1.0 specification (in XPath 2.0 this simply raises a type error), a the evaluation of a function that expects a string argument but is passed a node-set instead, takes the string value only of the 1st node in the node-set.

In this specific case, the first text node of the passed node-set has string value:

 "
                 Hello world "

so the comparison fails and the wanted td element isn't selected.

XSLT - based verification:

When this transformation is applied on the provided XML document:

      

        

          Hello world  how are you? 
          Have a wonderful day.
          Good bye!
        
      
      

        

          Hello NJ , how are you?
          Have a wonderful day.
        
      

the XPath expression is evaluated and the selected nodes (in this case just one) are copied to the output:

          Hello world  how are you? 
          Have a wonderful day.
          Good bye!