Finding the position of an element

To find the position of element <b>col_d</b> in the following xml:

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<a> <b>col_a</b> <b>col_b</b> <b>col_c</b> <b>col_d</b> <b>col_e</b> </a>

U can probably use the following xpath:

count(//b[normalize-space(text())="col_d"]/preceding-sibling::b)+1

But it doesn't work for me in nokogiri, so what i did was:

1 2	doc = Nokogiri::XML(above_xml_string) doc.xpath('//b[normalize-space(text())="col_d"]/preceding-sibling::b').count + 1

That's all !!

Getting the nearest xpath ancestor

Given the following xml fragment:

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<a> <a> <b/> </a> <a>

To find the nearest ancestor <a/> w.r.t <b/>, i use:

//b/ancestor::a[1]

That's all !!

Workaround for Webrat's have_xpath()

I have the following xpath:

//td[normalize-space(text())='Peter']/parent::tr//label[normalize-space(text())="Present"]/@for

It is valid, yet webrat's have_xpath() kept complaining that it cannot find it. As a workaround, i did something like this in my cucumber:

1 2	hdoc = Nokogiri::HTML(response.body) (field_id = hdoc.xpath(the_above_rejected_xpath)).first.should_not be_nil

That's all.

2 Way to Fetch a Node's Attribute Value

There are at least 2 ways to fetch a node's attribute value using xpath:

# Method 1

//a/b/@c

# Method 2

//a/b/attribute::c