PHP DOMXPath content match & select expression

Question

I'm trying to match and select a bunch of cols of a table but don't get it working. Here's a simplified table:

<table>
 <tr>
  <td>Foo</td>
  <td>Bar</td>
  <td>Arb</td>
  <td>...</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
  <td>Foo</td>
  <td>Rab</td>
 </tr>
</table>

So I want to get the TDs wich contain Bar and Arb and others but not Foo and nothing from the 2nd TR Block. Someone knows if this is possible with a XPath expression? Note: There's nothing static in there. The only way to get the correct cols is to match the first TDs content.

Answer 1

Don't know if my answer could help you out, but an adaptable XPath could look like:

//table/tr[1]/td[x] | //table/tr[1]/td[y] 

where x and y depends which column you'd like to target. The | computes two node-sets.

I'd also like to suggest you to install the XPath Checker Firefox AddOn ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xpath-checker/ ) where you're able to play around with the xPath syntax, in order to trigger a particular DOM Element of a website.