XPath for selecting all text nodes

Question

I'm writing a JavaScript function that can be used to replace text with HTML code, but to do this I need to be able to access text in text node form. The following XPath selects all div tags in a document:

//div

The following XPath selects all elements with the attribute class assigned the value myclass:

//*[@class="myclass"]

The following selects all of the text (not text nodes) that occurs at any level underneath the element with the ID comments:

//*[@id="comments"]//text()

What is an XPath that can be used to select all text nodes under any element? So, say I want to replace all the non-comment occurrences of the string Hebert and I need all of the text nodes so I can scan through them for that string. Would it use text() in the query?

Answer 1

Two options:

• To select all text nodes whose string value contains the substring "Herbert":

  //text()[contains(.,'Herbert')]
  

• To select all text nodes whose string value is "Herbert":

  //text()[.='Herbert']
  

Note that your comment,

The following selects all of the text (not text nodes)

regarding the XPath, //text(), is incorrect. The node test text() selects text nodes. In a string context, it will return the string-value of the text node, but text() alone most certainly selects actual text nodes.

See also Testing text() nodes vs string values in XPath