How to use XPath contains() for specific text?

Question

Say we have an HTML table which basically looks like this:

2|1|28|9|
3|8|5|10|
18|9|8|0|

I want to select the cells which contain only 8 an

Answer 1

Be careful of the contains() function.

It is a common mistake to use it to test if an element contains a value. What it really does is test if a string contains a substring. So, td[contains(.,'8')] takes the string value of td (.) and tests if it contains any '8' substrings. This might be what you want, but often it is not.

This XPath,

//td[.='8']

will select all td elements whose string-value equals 8.

Alternatively, this XPath,

//td[normalize-space()='8']

will select all td elements whose normalize-space() string-value equals 8. (The normalize-space() XPath function strips leading and trailing whitespace and replaces sequences of whitespace characters with a single space.)

Notes:

• Both will work even if the 8 is inside of another element such as a a, b, span, div, etc.
• Both will not match gr8t, 123456789, etc.
• Using normalize-space() will ignore leading or trailing whitespace surrounding the 8.