Can I select a DOM element based on an HTML comment it contains?

Question

Using either CSS3 or XPath expressions, I'd like to know if there is a way to select the element that contains certain HTML comment.

For example:

<table>…</table>
<table> <!--this one --> …</table>

How can I select the 2nd table without using any other attributes? (it may not always be the 2nd table)

Answer 1

With XPath this can be done using the comment() node test:

//table[.//comment()[contains(., 'this one')]]

This selects all table elements containing a comment (at any depth) that contains the text 'this one'.

I'm pretty sure this is impossible with CSS.