XPath find text in any text node

Question

I am trying to find a certain text in any text node in a document, so far my statement looks like this:

doc.xpath("//text() = 'Alliance Consulting'") do |node|   ... end 

This obviously does not work, can anyone suggest a better alternative?

Answer 1

This expression //text() = 'Alliance Consulting' evals to a boolean.

In case of this test sample:

<r>     <t>Alliance Consulting</t>     <s>         <p>Test string             <f>Alliance Consulting</f>         </p>     </s>     <z>         Alliance Consulting         <y>             Other string         </y>     </z> </r> 

It will return true of course.

Expression you need should evaluate to node-set, so use:

//text()[. = 'Alliance Consulting'] 

E.g. expression:

count(//text()[normalize-space() = 'Alliance Consulting']) 

against the above document will return 3.

To select text nodes which contain 'Alliance Consulting' in the whole string value (e.g. 'Alliance Consulting provides great services') use:

//text()[contains(.,'Alliance Consulting')] 

Do note that adjacent text nodes should become one after parser gets to the document.