Retrieve an xpath text contains using text()

Question

I\'ve been hacking away at this one for hours and I just can\'t figure it out. Using XPath to find text values is tricky and this problem has too many moving parts.

Answer 1

text() gets you a set of text nodes. I tend to use it more in a context of //span//text() or something.

If you are trying to check if the text inside an element contains something you should use contains on the element rather than the result of text() like this:

span[contains(., 'testuser')]

XPath is pretty good with context. If you know exactly what text a node should have you can do:

span[.='full text in this span']

But if you want to do something like regular expressions (using exslt for example) you'll need to use the string() function:

span[regexp:test(string(.), 'testuser')]