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I have a big HTML page. But I want to select certain nodes using Xpath:
<html>
........
<!-- begin content -->
<div>some text</div>
<div><p>Some more elements</p></div>
<!-- end content -->
.......
</html>
I can select HTML after the <!-- begin content --> using:
"//comment()[. = ' begin content ']/following::*"
Also I can select HTML before the <!-- end content --> using:
"//comment()[. = ' end content ']/preceding::*"
But do I have to have XPath to select all the HTML between the two comments?
697
I would look for elements that are preceded by the first comment and followed by the second comment:
doc.xpath("//*[preceding::comment()[. = ' begin content ']]
[following::comment()[. = ' end content ']]")
#=> <div>some text</div>
#=> <div>
#=> <p>Some more elements</p>
#=> </div>
#=> <p>Some more elements</p>
Note that the above gives you each element in between. This means that if you iterate through each the returned nodes, you will get some duplicated nested nodes - eg the "Some more elements".
I think you might actually want to just get the top-level nodes in between - ie the siblings of the comments. This can be done using the preceding/following-sibling instead.
doc.xpath("//*[preceding-sibling::comment()[. = ' begin content ']]
[following-sibling::comment()[. = ' end content ']]")
#=> <div>some text</div>
#=> <div>
#=> <p>Some more elements</p>
#=> </div>
Update - Including comments
Using //* only returns element nodes, which does not include comments (and some others). You could change * to node() to return everything.
puts doc.xpath("//node()[preceding-sibling::comment()[. = 'begin content']]
[following-sibling::comment()[. = 'end content']]")
#=>
#=> <!--keywords1: first_keyword-->
#=>
#=> <div>html</div>
#=>
If you just want element nodes and comments (ie not everything), you can use the self axis:
doc.xpath("//node()[self::* or self::comment()]
[preceding-sibling::comment()[. = 'begin content']]
[following-sibling::comment()[. = 'end content']]")
#~ #=> <!--keywords1: first_keyword-->
#~ #=> <div>html</div>
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