XPath - compound predicate + test if value does NOT start with something

Question

I need help with some XPath. Say I am working on XHTML. How do I select all the a elements whose href attribute is NOT empty and does not begin with, say, 'mailto:'?

Answer 1

You can use the starts-with() function:

//a[@href != '' and not(starts-with(@href, 'mailto:'))]