Databases
StackOverflow2013
Postsdbo
POUsing XPath: find last text node of each paragraph under the root node
Body
 

Note that there are some explanatory texts on larger screens.

plurals
  1. POUsing XPath: find last text node of each paragraph under the root node
    text
    copied!<p>I want to trim trailing whitespace at the end of all XHTML paragraphs. I am using Ruby with the REXML library.</p> <p>Say I have the following in a valid XHTML file:</p> <pre><code>&lt;p&gt;hello &lt;span&gt;world&lt;/span&gt; a &lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Hi there &lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The End &lt;/p&gt; </code></pre> <p>I want to end up with this:</p> <pre><code>&lt;p&gt;hello &lt;span&gt;world&lt;/span&gt; a&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Hi there&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The End&lt;/p&gt; </code></pre> <p>So I was thinking I could use XPath to get just the text nodes that I want, then trim the text, which would allow me to end up with what I want (previous).</p> <p>I started with the following XPath:</p> <pre><code>//root/p/child::text() </code></pre> <p>Of course, the problem here is that it returns all text nodes that are children of all p-tags. Which is this:</p> <pre><code>'hello ' ' a ' 'Hi there ' 'The End ' </code></pre> <p>Trying the following XPath gives me the last text node of the last paragraph, not the last text node of each paragraph that is a child of the root node.</p> <pre><code>//root/p/child::text()[last()] </code></pre> <p>This only returns: <code>'The End '</code></p> <p>What I would like to get from the XPath is therefore:</p> <pre><code>' a ' 'Hi there ' 'The End ' </code></pre> <p>Can I do this with XPath? Or should I maybe be looking at using regular expressions (That's probably more of a headache than XPath)?</p>
 

Querying!

 
Guidance
An individual column

Larger individual text columns get their own page to allow for proper reading.

SQuiL has stopped working due to an internal error.

If you are curious you may find further information in the browser console, which is accessible through the devtools (F12).

Reload