xpath expression to remove whitespace

I have this HTML:

 <tr class="even  expanded first>
   <td class="score-time status">
     <a href="/matches/2012/08/02/europe/uefa-cup/">
            
            16 : 00
            
     </a>
    </td>        
  </tr>

I want to extract the (16 : 00) string without the extra whitespace. Is this possible?

I. Use this single XPath expression:

translate(normalize-space(/tr/td/a), ' ', '')

Explanation:

1. normalize-space() produces a new string from its argument, in which any leading or trailing white-space (space, tab, NL or CR characters) is deleted and any intermediary white-space is replaced by a single space character.

2. translate() takes the result produced by normalize-space() and produces a new string in which each of the remaining intermediary spaces is replaced by the empty string.

---

II. Alternatively:

translate(/tr/td/a, ' 	
&#13', '')

Please try the below xpath expression :

//td[@class='score-time status']/a[normalize-space() = '16 : 00']

You can use XPath's normalize-space() as in //a[normalize-space()="16 : 00"]

I came across this thread when I was having my own issue similar to above.

HTML

<div class="d-flex">
<h4 class="flex-auto min-width-0 pr-2 pb-1 commit-title">
  <a href="/nsomar/OAStackView/releases/tag/1.0.1">
      
    1.0.1
  </a>

XPath start command

tree.xpath('//div[@class="d-flex"]/h4/a/text()')

However this grabbed random whitespace and gave me the output of:

['\n          ', '\n        1.0.1\n      ']

Using normalize-space, it removed the first blank space node and left me with just what I wanted

tree.xpath('//div[@class="d-flex"]/h4/a/text()[normalize-space()]')

['\n        1.0.1\n      ']

I could then grab the first element of the list, and use strip() to remove any further whitespace

XPath final command

tree.xpath('//div[@class="d-flex"]/h4/a/text()[normalize-space()]')[0].strip()

Which left me with exactly what I required:

1.0.1

• you can check if text() nodes are empty.

  /path/text()[not(.='')]

it may be useful with axes like following-sibling:: if these are no containers, or with child::.

• you can use string() or the regex() function of xpath 2.

NOTE: some comments say that xpath cannot do string manipulation... even if it's not really designed for that you can do basic things: contains(), starts-with(), replace().

if you want to check whitespace nodes it's much harder, as you will generally have a nodelist result set, and most xpath functions, like match or replace, only operate one node.

• you can separate node and string manipulation

So you may use xpath to retrieve a container, or a list of text nodes, and then process it with another language. (java, php, python, perl for instance).