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XPath expression for element content of given text node

I am coding some Perl to use XPath to search for a specific item tdin a table "that looks like this

  <table>
    <tr>
      <td>...</td>
      <td><font color="white" face="verdana, Helvetica, Arial" size="2">Showing <b>1</b>-<b>100</b> of <b>200</b> total</font></td>
      <td>...</td>
      <td>...</td>
    </tr>
  </table>

I want to find an element tdthat has a font/text()node that contains a string Showing.

corresponds to contains(., "Showing")

Direct comparison works fine:

//td[font/text()="Showing "]

but I want to use the contains()XPath function to make the match more flexible.

I tried

//td[contains(font/text(), "Showing ")]

but it causes an error

XPath failed due to: A sequence of more than one item is not allowed as the first argument of contains()

and I managed to achieve what I want with

//td[font/text()[contains(., "Showing")]]

but it is very ugly, and I hope for something more concise. Please, can someone improve this for me or perhaps confirm that this is the best and most concise way?

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1 answer

:

//td[contains(font/text()[1], 'Showing ')]
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