How do I get the value inside a <td> tag with xpath/htmlwebunit

Question

I am trying to create a Java Application that retrieves information from a webpage. This is part of the code I am trying to access the value in the 1st td tag in the 2nd tr tag:

<TABLE  CLASS="datadisplaytable" width = "100%">
<TR>
    <TD CLASS="dddead">&nbsp;</TD>
    <TH CLASS="ddheader" scope="col" ><SPAN class="fieldlabeltext">Capacity</SPAN></TH>
    <TH CLASS="ddheader" scope="col" ><SPAN class="fieldlabeltext">Actual</SPAN></TH>
    <TH CLASS="ddheader" scope="col" ><SPAN class="fieldlabeltext">Remaining</SPAN></TH>
</TR> 
<TR>
    <TH CLASS="ddlabel" scope="row" ><SPAN class="fieldlabeltext">Seats</SPAN></TH>
    **<TD CLASS="dddefault">46</TD>**
    <TD CLASS="dddefault">46</TD>
    <TD CLASS="dddefault">0</TD>
</TR>

This is what i have right now but this only returns the class of the td tag and not the value inside it:

List<?> table = page.getByXPath("//table[@class='datadisplaytable'][1]//tr[2]/td");

How would I go about getting the value of the td tag and not its properties?

edit: The code above returns this:

HtmlTableDataCell[<td class="dddefault">]

Solution 1

I am trying to create a Java Application that retrieves information from a webpage. This is part of the code I am trying to access the value in the 1st td tag in the 2nd tr tag:

Assuming that the document is as shown in the question (TABLE is the top element),

Use:

/TABLE/TR[2]/TD[1]/text()

This selects any text-node child of the first TD child of the second TR child of the top element TABLE.

In case the table is buried in the XML document, but can be uniquely identified by its CLASS attribute, use:

//TABLE[@CLASS='datadisplaytable']/TR[2]/TD[1]/text()

This selects any text-node child of the first TD child of the second TR child of any (we know thre is only one such) element TABLE in the XML document, such that the string value of its CLASS attribute is the string 'datadisplaytable'.

Finally, if even worse, there could be many TABLE elements whose CLASS attribute's value is 'datadisplaytable', and we want to select in the first such table, use:

(//TABLE[@CLASS='datadisplaytable'])[1]/TR[2]/TD[1]/text()

Solution 2

for getting the text content from an element there is an xpath function called "text()" which you can use.

Element containing text 't' exactly         //*[.='t']  
Element <E> containing text 't'             //*[.='t']  
<a> containing text 't'                     //a[contains(text(),'t')]
<a> with target link 'url'                  //a[@href='url']
Link URL labeled with text 't' exactly      //a[.='t']/@href

If you are also using JwebUnit, there is a method "getElementTextByXPath" which can also be used to get the text. net.sourceforge.jwebunit.junit.WebTestCase

getElementTextByXPath

public String getElementTextByXPath(String xpath) Deprecated. Get text of the given element. Parameters: xpath - xpath of the element.

    for (int i = 1; i != 6; i++) {

        String result = getElementTextByXPath("//td["+i+"][text()]");

        System.out.println("The Content of TD is " +result);
    }

Comments

[KrispyDonuts]

This helps a lot in understanding the details of xpath. I did not know it was possible to just do text(). This might be better than casting and using .getTextContent(). Thanks for the help!

[Dimitre Novatchev]

@Saad: You can get directly the string value by using the standard XPath function string(). So, string(expressionSelectingAnElement) returns the concatenation of all the text-node descendents of the element.