Xpath: How to check if a tag comes before text or after text?-CodePudding

Assume I have the following two example pieces of HTML:

This is some text: ABCD12345

Name: John Doe

I'm able to separate the  and non- parts, but I (also) want to know how to determine whether the  part is at the start or at the end of the text (in other words; whether it has text before or after). How to do that?

I'm using Python (with lxml) if it matters (I don't think it really does).

CodePudding user response：

This XPath,

not(/p/b/following-sibling::text())

will return true iff there are no text nodes following b in p, as in your first case:

<p>This is some text: <b>ABCD12345</b></p>

This XPath,

not(/p/b/preceding-sibling::text())

will return true iff there are no text nodes preceding b in p, as in your second case:

<p><b>Name:</b> John Doe</p>

If it's not the absence but the presence of text before/after the b element that's of interest, you can change the not() to boolean() in those XPath expressions.