XPath expression for containing element of a given text node

Question

I am coding some Perl to use XPath to locate a particular td element within a table` that looks similar to this

  <table>
    <tr>
      <td>...</td>
      <td><font color="white" face="verdana, Helvetica, Arial" size="2">Showing <b>1</b>-<b>100</b> of <b>200</b> total</font></td>
      <td>...</td>
      <td>...</td>
    </tr>
  </table>

What I want is to find a td element that has a font/text() node that contains the string Showing.

matches contains(., "Showing")

A direct comparison works fine:

//td[font/text()="Showing "]

but I want to use the contains() XPath function so that the match is more flexible.

I have tried

//td[contains(font/text(), "Showing ")]

but this raises the error

XPath failed due to: A sequence of more than one item is not allowed as the first argument of contains()

and I have managed to achieve what I want with

//td[font/text()[contains(., "Showing")]]

but this is very ugly and I am hoping for something more concise. Please can someone improve on this for me, or perhaps confirm that this is the best and most concise way?

Answer 1

Try this:

//td[contains(font/text()[1], 'Showing ')]