Let's say you want to find the element with the text hello in the following DOM tree:
<html>
<body>
<article>
<strong>hello</strong>
<strong>world</strong>
</article>
</body>
</html>
You might think of XPath's contain() function:
page.find(:xpath, ".//*[contains(text(), 'hello')")
Unfortunately that returns a lot more elements than you expect:
[ <html>...<html>,
<body>...</body>,
<article>...</article>,
<strong>hello</strong> ]
What you need to do instead is to find all elements containing "hello" which don't have a descendant containing "hello":
page.find(:xpath, ".//*[contains(text(), 'hello') and not (./*[contains(text(), 'hello')])]")
With jQuery
jQuery has a custom selector :contains() that you can use in the same fashion:
$(":contains('hello'):not(:has(:contains('hello')))")
Posted by Henning Koch to makandra dev (2016-03-02 10:22)