XPath to return string concatenation of qualifying child node values

user_168614 0
Viewed 51141

Can anyone please suggest an XPath expression format that returns a string value containing the concatenated values of certain qualifying child nodes of an element, but ignoring others:

<div>
    This text node should be returned.
    <em>And the value of this element.</em>
    And this.
    <p>But this paragraph element should be ignored.</p>
</div>

The returned value should be a single string:

This text node should be returned. And the value of this element. And this.

Is this possible in a single XPath expression?

Thanks.

string-concatenation xpath
7 Answers

I know this comes a bit late, but I figure my answer could still be relevant. I recently ran into a similar problem. And because I use scrapy in Python 3.6, which does not support xpath 2.0, I could not use the string-join function suggested in several online answers.

I ended up finding a simple workaround (as shown below) which I did not see in any of the stackoverflow answers, that's why I'm sharing it.

temp_selector_list = response.xpath('/div')
string_result = [''.join(x.xpath(".//text()").extract()) for x in temp_selector_list]

Hope this helps!

user_10995100
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