XPATH to check on a specific text within a node

Question

I have this as a node to parse:

<h3 class="atag">
    <a href="http://www.example.com">
      <span class="btag">text to be ignored</span>
         </a>
           <span class="ctag">text to be checked</span>
</h3>

I'm gonna need to extract " http://www.example.com " but not the part text to to be ignored; I also need to check that if ctag contains text to be checked.

I came up with this but it seems it doesn't do the job.

response.xpath("//h3/a/@*[not(self::span)]").extract()

any idea on this?

Answer 1

If you need to just select href from 'a' tag, use @href. To also check, whether the ctag contains some text, I think you can use code like this:

'//h3[contains(span[@class="ctag"]/text(), "text to be checked")]/a/@href'

This would check whether there is a span with "text to be checked" inside given h3 block. If the text exists, the 'www.example.com' would be found, otherwise there would be an empty result.

Answer 2

Do you mean something like this XPath? :

//h3/a[following-sibling::span[@class='ctag' and .='text to be checked']/@href

above XPath get <a> tag that followed by <span class="ctag"> containing value of "text to be checked" , then return href attribute from the previously mentioned <a> tag.