Say you have HTML similar to the following:

<div style="background-image: url('https://some.domain/image')"></div>

and you want to extract https://some.domain/image using XPath. With XPath 2.0, you can select the URL with something like

select-before(select-after(//div/@style, "backgound-image: url("), ")")

but, when using XPath 1.0, this fails — I think it’s due to nested functions not being supported in XPath 1.0, but I have been unable to find documentation to confirm that. Is there a way to accomplish this using XPath 1.0?

  • @towerful
    2•1 month ago

    A quick Google suggests what you have.

    If the code you have quoted is verbatim what you have tried, seems like you need to extract the parentheses and possibly a single or double quote, depending on the source css. The example source you have given has a single quote.

    select-before(select-after(//div/@style, "backgound-image: url("), ")")

    Should be (notice the extra ' relating to url('...url'))

    select-before(select-after(//div/@style, "backgound-image: url('"), "')")

    But I don’t think that would cause xpath to fail… It would just extract the wrong value

    Edit:
    Further reading suggests xpath 1.0 does have limited functionalities. But, like you, can’t find anything concrete.