XPath to return string concatenation of qualifying child node values

Question

Can anyone please suggest an XPath expression format that returns a string value containing the concatenated values of certain qualifying child nodes of an element, but igno

Answer 1

If you want all children except p, you can try the following...

    string-join(//*[name() != 'p']/text(), "")

which returns...

This text node should be returned.
And the value of this element.
And this.

Answer 2

You could use a for-each loop as well and assemble the values in a variable like this

<xsl:variable name="newstring">
    <xsl:for-each select="/div//text()">
      <xsl:value-of select="."/>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </xsl:variable>

Answer 3

In XPath 1.0:

You can use

/div//text()[not(parent::p)]

to capture the wanted text nodes. The concatenation itself cannot be done in XPath 1.0, I recommend doing it in the host application.

Answer 4

/div//text()

double slash forces to extract text regardless of intermediate nodes

Answer 5

In XPath 2.0 :

string-join(/*/node()[not(self::p)], '')

Answer 6

I know this comes a bit late, but I figure my answer could still be relevant. I recently ran into a similar problem. And because I use scrapy in Python 3.6, which does not support xpath 2.0, I could not use the string-join function suggested in several online answers.

I ended up finding a simple workaround (as shown below) which I did not see in any of the stackoverflow answers, that's why I'm sharing it.

temp_selector_list = response.xpath('/div')
string_result = [''.join(x.xpath(".//text()").extract()) for x in temp_selector_list]

Hope this helps!