How can I find the link URL by link text with XPath?

xml xhtml xpath

161,172

Solution 1

Should be something similar to:

//a[text()='text_i_want_to_find']/@href

Solution 2

Too late for you, but for anyone else with the same question...

//a[contains(text(), 'programming')]/@href

Of course, 'programming' can be any text fragment.

Solution 3

//a[text()='programming quesions site']/@href

which basically identifies an anchor node <a> that has the text you want, and extracts the href attribute.

Solution 4

Think of the phrase in the square brackets as a WHERE clause in SQL.

So this query says, "select the "href" attribute (@) of an "a" tag that appears anywhere (//), but only where (the bracketed phrase) the textual contents of the "a" tag is equal to 'programming questions site'".

Solution 5

For case insensitive contains, use the following:

//a[contains(translate(text(),'PROGRAMMING','programming'), 'programming')]/@href

translate converts capital letters in PROGRAMMING to lower case programming.

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161,172

Author by

flybywire

Updated on July 02, 2020

Comments

flybywire almost 4 years
I have a well formed XHTML page. I want to find the destination URL of a link when I have the text that is linked.

Example
```
<a href="http://stackoverflow.com">programming questions site</a>
<a href="http://cnn.com">news</a>
```
I want an XPath expression such that if given programming questions site it will give http://stackoverflow.com and if I give it news it will give http://cnn.com.
flybywire about 15 years

will I ever learn xpath? when I see a query it is so obvious and easy to understand... but I am never able to write one on my own
James P. almost 12 years

@flybywire If you read this Stanford's free Introduction to Databases course has a good section on XML and XPath.
Sklivvz almost 11 years

Please don't add "thanks" as answers. Invest some time in the site and you will gain sufficient privileges to upvote answers you like, which is the Stack Overflow way of saying thank you.
Abdo almost 11 years

"Thanks" wasn't my "answer". I was, in a way, giving credit to an answer above that I improved on.
Karim Narsindani over 9 years

Hi Peter, do you have any tutorial site to learn xpath query?
Aaron Gillion about 9 years

This one is more generalized. Good share
danpop over 8 years

Instead of text(), you can use ".=", for example //a[.='Register here']
Alston almost 6 years

What if I don't know the text? Can I select the nodes which contains http or certain keyword?
user3060430 over 3 years

This is case sensitive. Can I ignore the case here?