如何返回XPath表达式的单个字符串值？

Question

This is my HTML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<div class="single-main"> 
  <h3 class="description-area">Description</h3>  
  <p>bla bla bla
    <br/> some text 
    <br/> some text here ,
    <br/> other text here
  </p> 
</div>

I want to get the whole text but in one XPath expression.

This is my code:

response.xpath(".//h3[@class='description-area']/following-sibling::p
                //text()[count(preceding-sibling::br) >= 0]").extract()[0]

but it returns just the text before the first br (I know why, and that's because I am using .extract()[0] and if i used .extract()[1] and [2] .... I will get what I want, but I must use .extract[0] because it is a platform that does just that. Is there any XPath to return the whole text but in one string rather than in multiple strings?

Answer 1

string(/) will return the string value of the whole document.

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Update : To return the four separate strings returned by this XPath,

.//h3[@class='description-area']/following-sibling::p//text()[count(preceding-sibling::br) >= 0]

as a single string, wrap the above XPath similarly in string() :

string(.//h3[@class='description-area']/following-sibling::p//text()[count(preceding-sibling::br) >= 0])

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Update 2 : But the br and text() maneuvers aren't necessary. You can simply get the string value of the p :

string(.//h3[@class='description-area']/following-sibling::p)