Xpath Question: Returning a URL from an onclick node

[shadowplay]

I apologize if this is the wrong forum, just wasn't sure where to put this question. I'm trying to return the url from this onclick node: <a onclick=”javascript:getURLWin(‘http://some.web.url/some/path/index.html’); href=”javascript:void(0);”>; here is the block of text which describes the page </a> So far, I've tried td[2]/a/[@onclick=”javascript:getURLWin(‘”;] , and that hasn't worked. Can anyone offer suggestions? Thanks

[boen_robot]

Remove the slash before the predicate, and remove the ";", i.e. instead of

td[2]/a/[@onclick="javascript:getURLWin('";]

make that

td[2]/a[@onclick="javascript:getURLWin('"]

However, it's important to note that, as written, this would not match "javascript:void(0)". It would only match an "a" element that looks like

<a onclick="javascript:getURLWin('">

and that's probably not what you want.I'm guessing you want the attribute that starts with that, which you can do like:

td[2]/a[starts-with(@onclick, "javascript:getURLWin('")]/@onclick

[shadowplay]

I'm sorry for not getting back sooner. I appreciate your response. When I tried this, we seem to get the url, but we also get the 'javascript:getURLWin(', that precedes this. Is there a way to bascially cut the string to only return what comes after the parenthesis? Thanks

[boen_robot]

Yes. Surround the whole expression with substring-after(). e.g.

substring-after(td[2]/a[starts-with(@onclick, "javascript:getURLWin('")]/@onclick)

I assume you'll also want to get rid of the trailing ")". That's a little difficult to get with just XPath 1.0. The best you can do is just remove the last N characters, assuming that they're always that many. For performance, you might want to store the full result before you cut it. If you're using this XPath in XSLT, you can use xsl:variable for that, e.g.

<xsl:variable name="url" select="substring-after(td[2]/a[starts-with(@onclick, "javascript:getURLWin('")]/@onclick)" /><xsl:value-of select="substring($url, 0, string-length($url)-2)" />

[shadowplay]

Hey, thanks for the help. We got it to work!