xpath find node that does not contain child

Question

I'm trying to create some xpath that will find all a tags that do not contain img tags, so that something such as

<a href="http://aol.com">link</a>

matches, but

<a href="http://yahoo.com"><img src="http://yahoo.com/logo.png"></a>

does not.

Of course I could do this in a two-part search but I'm sure there must be some way to do this with xpath.

Solution

//a[not(img)]

Try and avoid the // if you can, though. Also note this will only exclude as that directly contain imgs.

Comments

[Admin]

XPath expression for "any a element not having an img descendant element": //a[not(.//img)]

[Kinjal Dixit]

I needed first td which did not have a link //table/tr/td[1][not(a) and not(b)]. The html had used td for table headers, and the table headers were wrapped in <b>, so I had to skip those as well.