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?

  • Kalcifer@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    Asking just because I’m curious… why are you using xpath?

    I’m using a service called FreshRSS that automatically fetches RSS feeds. It has a feature that allows you to create custom feeds for sites by scraping the HTML with user specified XPath expressions.

    I know that this isn’t exactly “web development”, but it uses webdev tools, and I wasn’t entirely sure where else to post this.

    If you’re rendering the page (in a browser, e2e test-runner, spider bot, etc…), have you considered running some js on the page to get the image? Something like: const imagePath = document.getElementById(‘exampleIdOnElement’).style.backgroundImage

    JS is, unfortunately, not possible here. I can only use XPath expressions.