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xpathxidelxpathquery

Xidel: How to choose only 1 from many same value/class and remove unneeded elements from the result?

xidel -se '//strong[@class="n-heading"][1]/text()[1]' 'https://www.anekalogam.co.id/id'

will print out 3 same outputs

15 June 2020 
                     
15 June 2020 
                     
15 June 2020  

so, what should I do in order to choose only 1 of them?

edit:

inside the strong class, the value looks like this:

 15 June 2020 
                     

How to print only the "15 June 2020"?

Solution

  • Let me illustrate why this happens with the following example.

    'test.htm':

    <html>
  <body>
    <div>
      <span>test1</span>
      <span>test2</span>
      <span>test3</span>
    </div>
    <div>
      <span>test4</span>
    </div>
    <div>
      <span>test5</span>
    </div>
    <div>
      <span>test6</span>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

    xidel -s test.htm -e '//div[1]/span[1]'
test1

xidel -s test.htm -e '//span[1]'
test1
test4
test5
test6

xidel -s test.htm -e '(//span)[1]'
test1

    In other words, you have to put the "strong"-node between parentheses:

    xidel -s https://www.anekalogam.co.id/id -e '(//strong[@class="n-heading"])[1]/text()[1]'

    This isn't needed if you grab the parent-node instead:

    xidel -s https://www.anekalogam.co.id/id -e '//p[@class="n-smaller ngc-intro"]/strong/text()[1]'

    [Bonus]

    You've probably noticed already that the desired text-node spans 2 lines and ends with a &nbsp;. To have xidel return just "15 June 2020":

    xidel -s https://www.anekalogam.co.id/id -e '//p[@class="n-smaller ngc-intro"]/strong/normalize-space(substring-before(text(),x:cps(160)))'

    - x:cps() is a shorthand for codepoints-to-string() (and string-to-codepoints()) and 160 is the codepoint for a "No-Break Space".
    - text()[1] isn't needed, because whenever you feed a sequence to a filter that expects a string, only the first item of that sequence will be used.