使用XPATH从html标记内的文本中提取日期

Question

Extract date inside html tag using xpath substring

I have tried using substring in xpath

<span id="latestReplyLine"><a href="#comment-965609" class="lastScroll js-latest-reply">Latest reply</a> on May 22, 2019 by John Stoltzfus</span>

I am using below xpath query to extract text

/span[@id="latestReplyLine"]/text()[substring-after(substring-before(.,' by '), ' on ')]

Expected result -

"May 22, 2019"

But I am getting,

"on May 22, 2019 by John Stoltzfus"

any idea?

Answer 1

You were missing the right string by one space ( on instead of on ).
An improved XPath expression is the following:

normalize-space(substring-after(substring-before(string(/span[@id='latestReplyLine']),'by'), 'on'))

This will give you the right result.