How do you extract an embedded attribute value from a previous attribute value in an XPath query?

Question

I'm trying to "select" the link from the onclick attribute in the following portion of html

<span onclick="Javascript:document.quickFindForm.action='/blah_blah'" 
 class="specialLinkType"><img src="blah"></span>

but can't get any further than the following XPath

//span[@class="specialLinkType"]/@onclick

which only returns

Javascript:document.quickFindForm.action

Any ideas on how to pick out that link inside of the quickFindForm.action with an XPath?

Answer 1

I tried the XPath in a Java application and it worked ok:

    import java.io.IOException;
    import java.io.StringReader;

    import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
    import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
    import javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException;
    import javax.xml.xpath.XPath;
    import javax.xml.xpath.XPathExpression;
    import javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactory;

    import org.w3c.dom.Document;
    import org.xml.sax.InputSource;
    import org.xml.sax.SAXException;

    public class Teste {

        public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
            Document doc = stringToDom("<span onclick=\"Javascript:document.quickFindForm.action='/blah_blah'\" class=\"specialLinkType\"><img src=\"blah\"/></span>");
            XPath newXPath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
            XPathExpression xpathExpr = newXPath.compile("//span[@class=\"specialLinkType\"]/@onclick");
            String result = xpathExpr.evaluate(doc);
            System.out.println(result);

        }

        public static Document stringToDom(String xmlSource) throws SAXException, ParserConfigurationException, IOException {
            DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
            DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
            return builder.parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(xmlSource)));
        }
    }

Result:

Javascript:document.quickFindForm.action='/blah_blah'