scrapy and xpath function 'matches' syntax

Question

I\'m running scrapy 0.20.2.

$ scrapy shell \"http://newyork.craigslist.org/ata/\"

I would like to make the list of all links to advertiseme

Answer 1

For this special use case, there is an XPath 1.0-workaround using translate(...):

//a[
  translate(substring-before(@href, '.html'), '0123456789', '') = ''
  and @href != '.html'
  and substring-after(@href, '.html') = '']

The translate(...) call removes all digits from the name part before the .html extension. The second line check makes sure .html is excluded (nothing before the dot), the last makes sure .html actually is the file extension.