How do I get the value inside a <td> tag with xpath/htmlwebunit

KrispyDonuts picture KrispyDonuts · Feb 28, 2012 · Viewed 12.4k times · Source

I am trying to create a Java Application that retrieves information from a webpage. This is part of the code I am trying to access the value in the 1st td tag in the 2nd tr tag:

<TABLE  CLASS="datadisplaytable" width = "100%">
<TR>
    <TD CLASS="dddead">&nbsp;</TD>
    <TH CLASS="ddheader" scope="col" ><SPAN class="fieldlabeltext">Capacity</SPAN></TH>
    <TH CLASS="ddheader" scope="col" ><SPAN class="fieldlabeltext">Actual</SPAN></TH>
    <TH CLASS="ddheader" scope="col" ><SPAN class="fieldlabeltext">Remaining</SPAN></TH>
</TR> 
<TR>
    <TH CLASS="ddlabel" scope="row" ><SPAN class="fieldlabeltext">Seats</SPAN></TH>
    **<TD CLASS="dddefault">46</TD>**
    <TD CLASS="dddefault">46</TD>
    <TD CLASS="dddefault">0</TD>
</TR>

This is what i have right now but this only returns the class of the td tag and not the value inside it:

List<?> table = page.getByXPath("//table[@class='datadisplaytable'][1]//tr[2]/td");

How would I go about getting the value of the td tag and not its properties?

edit: The code above returns this:

HtmlTableDataCell[<td class="dddefault">]

Answer

Dimitre Novatchev picture Dimitre Novatchev · Feb 28, 2012

I am trying to create a Java Application that retrieves information from a webpage. This is part of the code I am trying to access the value in the 1st td tag in the 2nd tr tag:

Assuming that the document is as shown in the question (TABLE is the top element),

Use:

/TABLE/TR[2]/TD[1]/text()

This selects any text-node child of the first TD child of the second TR child of the top element TABLE.

In case the table is buried in the XML document, but can be uniquely identified by its CLASS attribute, use:

//TABLE[@CLASS='datadisplaytable']/TR[2]/TD[1]/text()

This selects any text-node child of the first TD child of the second TR child of any (we know thre is only one such) element TABLE in the XML document, such that the string value of its CLASS attribute is the string 'datadisplaytable'.

Finally, if even worse, there could be many TABLE elements whose CLASS attribute's value is 'datadisplaytable', and we want to select in the first such table, use:

(//TABLE[@CLASS='datadisplaytable'])[1]/TR[2]/TD[1]/text()