I have a radio button with value as HTML as follows:
<div class='result'>
<span>
<input type='radio'/>
option1
</span>
<span>
<input type='radio'/>
option2
</span>
<span>
<input type='radio'/>
option3
</span>
</div>
I tried the following XPath, but this isn't working:
//span[contains(text(),'option1')]/input[@type='radio']
Please help me write XPath for this.
There are actually two text nodes in target span: the first one is just an empty string before <input> and the second- after <input> (the one that contains "option1")
And your XPath //span[contains(text(),'option1')] means return span that contains "option1" in first text node.
You can use one of below expressions to match required input:
//span[normalize-space()="option1"]/input[@type="radio"]//span[contains(text()[2],'option1')]/input[@type='radio']
I guess you can't use text() here. Because this function returns a sequence of child text nodes of current span element. There are 2 text nodes in your example:
<span>
<input type='radio'/>
option1
</span>
1st text node is between <span> and <input type='radio'/> containing just a newline.
2nd text node is between <input type='radio'/> and </span> containing option1 text plus 2 newlines (at the begining and at the ending).
contains function expects a string argument instead of a sequence. I think it will take only first text node from the sequence, which contains just a newline.
If you need to select input followed by some text node you can use the following expression:
//input[@type='radio'][contains(following-sibling::text(), 'option1')]
If you need to select span containing text option1 and input with @type='radio', you can try the following expression:
//span[contains(., 'option1') and input/@type='radio']
If you need to select input instead of span then use the following expression:
//span[contains(., 'option1')]/input[@type='radio']
I can suggest you the following resources to gain some information about XPath. W3C recomendations contains a full description of XPath. If you use XPath 2.0 then you can look at:
For XPath 3.0 look at:
These recomendations are big enough and hard to read. But you can find in these documents a list of all available axes including following-sibling::, a description of text(), a description of contains(), etc.
Also there are a lot of brief XPath tutorials. For example you can look at this one.
There are two text elements per span. One precedes the input element, and one follows it, but the first one is essentially empty.
In this code I find the input elements, then their parents, then the second text elements of those span parents.
>>> from scrapy.selector import Selector
>>> selector = Selector(text=open('temp.html').read())
>>> for item in selector.xpath('.//input[@type="radio"]/../text()[2]'):
... item.extract()
...
'\noption1\n'
'\noption2\n'
'\noption3\n'
try this to select option 1
//input[@type='radio']/preceding::span[1][contains(.,'option1')]
