XPATH: Find piece of text anywhere in document

Question

Is there any way to just search the whole html document for a piece of text without worrying about tags, classes etc?

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered May 16 '17 at 09:05

3

Yes, something like this :

//text()[contains(.,'keyword')]

Or, use one of the following XPath if you prefer to return parent element where the target keyword resides :

//*[text()[contains(.,'keyword')]]
//text()[contains(.,'keyword')]/..

answered May 16 '17 at 09:05

har07

86,209
12
77
125

1

Only limitation with this is that the string must be contained in a single text node: so no internal markup. – Michael Kay May 16 '17 at 15:30

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:03

1

This XPath,

contains(/,'keyword')

will return true if keyword is contained anywhere in the string value of the document.

Note it could match substrings conjoined across elements (i.e. <r>key<b>word</b></r>), which may or may not be desirable. If undesirable, see @har07's answer (+1).

See also: Testing text() nodes vs string values in XPath

edited May 23 '17 at 12:03

Community

1
1

answered May 16 '17 at 15:41

kjhughes

98,039
18
159
218

XPATH: Find piece of text anywhere in document

2 Answers2