Locating a web element using xPath by text is split across several spans

Question

Can somebody help me find an xPath, that would locate an element based on its text, which is split across several spans? When I use text() function, it seems to only find the starting sequence of the element text until the first span.

For example in a following scenario I would like to locate only the first <h5> and not the other one. That is to find an element, which displays a text "A xxx B"

...
<h5>
A
<span>xxx</span>
B
</h5>
...
<h5>
A
<span>xxx</span>
C
</h5>

Answer 1

You can match all h5 and only copy / do whatever with the nodes, if they meet a certain condition. This condition is to check the last text node (or [2] for second), whether it is equal to some hardcoded string. You may need to use normalize-space() to eleminate whitespace from the text node:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

  <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>

  <xsl:template match="/">
    <result>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="root/h5"/>
    </result>
  </xsl:template>


  <xsl:template match="h5">
    <xsl:if test="normalize-space(./text()[last()]) = 'C'">
      <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
    </xsl:if>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Result:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<result>
  <h5>
    A
    <span>xxx</span>
    C
  </h5>
</result>

Answer 2

Try this:

h5[1]

You can select a certain item of a collection by using an index.

Answer 3

Use descendant-or-self::node() to get the whole text from the h5 tag, handle newlines and spaces with normalize-space():

//h5[normalize-space(descendant-or-self::node()) = 'A xxx B']

Demo (using xmllint):

$ xmllint index.html --xpath "//h5[normalize-space(descendant-or-self::node()) = 'A xxx B']"
<h5>
    A
    <span>xxx</span>
    B
</h5>

where index.html contains:

<div>
    <h5>
        A
        <span>xxx</span>
        B
    </h5>
    ...
    <h5>
        A
        <span>xxx</span>
        C
    </h5>
</div>

Answer 4

Similar situation:

<button title="Create New" accesskey="N">
Create
<span class="X">N</span>
ew
</button>

It create button with text "Create New". To find this button you can use

 //button[descendant-or-self::* = 'Create New']

This is simpler version of alecxe answer (if you don't have space inside)