Xpath syntax for "and not contains"

Question

Here is the XPath I'm trying to use:

//div[contains(@class='xyz ng-binding ng-scope') and not(contains(@class = 'ng-hide'))]

I'm not sure what the correct syntax for this is. Basically the HTML looks like like:

class="xyz ng-binding ng-scope typeA ng-hide"
class="xyz ng-binding ng-scope typeB ng-hide"

I want to select the case where the HTML is either typeA or typeB but does not have ng-hide.

Answer 1

You could do something like this:

//div[(contains(@class,'typeA') or contains(@class,'typeB')) and not(contains(@class,'ng-hide'))]

You should also take a look at How can I match on an attribute that contains a certain string? to see why the contains() above might not match exactly what you're intending.

For example, to truly match what you are intending, you could use:

//div[(contains(concat(' ',@class,' '),' typeA ') or contains(concat(' ',@class,' '),' typeB ')) and not(contains(concat(' ',@class,' '),' ng-hide '))]

It's much easier in XPath 2.0, but I'm not sure if qtp supports it. If you could make concat(' ',@class,' ') a variable, you could clean up the XPath too.

Here's a 2.0 example just in case:

//div[tokenize(@class,'\s')=('typeA','typeB') and not(tokenize(@class,'\s')='ng-hide')]

Answer 2

contains() is a function that takes two arguments: contains(A, B) returns true if B is a substring of A.

So your syntax would become valid if you replaced your "=" with ",": contains(@class, 'X') in place of contains(@class = 'X'). But I don't know whether it would then do what you want against all possible input data - that's a different question.