XPATH getting all tags without <script> and </script> tags

Question

I have some problem gettings all the html tags without <script> or <script ... /> using Xpath.

For example, in this part of the HTML code, i want to remove :

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/coop/cse/brand?form=cse-search-box&amp;lang=fr"/>

for this code

<li><!-- Search Google -->
<center>
                     <form action="http://www.google.fr/cse" id="cse-search-box" target="_blank">
                        <div>
                           <input type="hidden" name="cx" value="partner-pub-0959382714089534:mw3ssl65jk1"/>
                           <input type="hidden" name="ie" value="ISO-8859-1"/>
                           <input type="text" name="q" size="31"/>
                           <input type="submit" name="sa" value="Rechercher"/>
                        </div>
                     </form>
                     <script type="text/javascript"
                             src="http://www.google.com/coop/cse/brand?form=cse-search-box&amp;lang=fr"/>
                  </center>
                  <!-- Search Google --></li>

I'm generating an xml file using Web-Harvest, and then i have to remove some specifics tags. I have try a lot of xpath (i'm working in the body of the html) :

• //body//*[not(name() = 'script')]

• //body//*[not(self::script)]

• //body//*[not(starts-with(name(),'script'))]

• //body//*[not(contains(name(),'script'))]

but it's not working.

Note that //body//*[name() = 'script'] is working, but i want the opposite...

Do you have some ideas ?

Or more generaly, if you know how to remove all the <script> <script/> tag using Xpath, i'm also interest in :-)

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Well first of all XPath selects nodes in an existing document, it does not remove them. And your path //body//* you start with selects all child and descendant elements of the body element. Even if you now add a predicate like //body//*[not(self::script)] that path still selects elements like the li and the center element that are not themselves script elements but which contain a script element. So //body//*[not(self::script)] is the right approach not to select any non-script elements but it does not help if you want for instance the original center element with the script element being removed. That is not something pure XPath can do for you, you would need to move to XSLT to transform the document and that way remove any script elements.

Answer 2

XPath is just a query language for XML documents and as such it cannot alter in any way the XML document(s) that is being queried.

The most convenient way to produce a new XML document that is different from the initial XML document is by using XSLT.

This short and simple XSLT transformation:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>
 <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

 <xsl:template match="node()|@*">
  <xsl:copy>
   <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
  </xsl:copy>
 </xsl:template>

 <xsl:template match="script"/>
</xsl:stylesheet>

when applied on the provided XML document:

<li>
    <!-- Search Google -->
    <center>
        <form action="http://www.google.fr/cse"
              id="cse-search-box" target="_blank">
            <div>
                <input type="hidden" name="cx"
                value="partner-pub-0959382714089534:mw3ssl65jk1"/>
                <input type="hidden" name="ie" value="ISO-8859-1"/>
                <input type="text" name="q" size="31"/>
                <input type="submit" name="sa" value="Rechercher"/>
            </div>
        </form>
        <script type="text/javascript"
        src="http://www.google.com/coop/cse/brand?form=cse-search-box&amp;lang=fr"/>
    </center>
    <!-- Search Google -->
</li>

produces the wanted, correct result:

<li><!-- Search Google -->
   <center>
      <form action="http://www.google.fr/cse" id="cse-search-box" target="_blank">
         <div>
            <input type="hidden" name="cx" value="partner-pub-0959382714089534:mw3ssl65jk1"/>
            <input type="hidden" name="ie" value="ISO-8859-1"/>
            <input type="text" name="q" size="31"/>
            <input type="submit" name="sa" value="Rechercher"/>
         </div>
      </form>
   </center><!-- Search Google -->
</li>