XPathBridge - how to select multiple categories?

[drelephant]

Disclaimer, I first learned about XPaths today, so this may be a stupid question...

I'm trying to parse categories from a page that has the following html:

<span itemprop="applicationCategory">
<a href="https://sitename/software/">Software</a> » 
<a href="https://sitename/software/mac/">Mac OSX</a>
</span>

, and for the item category selector, I put in .//span[@itemprop="applicationCategory"]//a.

I believe that should select both entries, but it only returns the first one?

If I put in simply, .//span[@itemprop="applicationCategory"], then it shows all the text, but there's only one entry in the list, "Software » Mac OSX", not two entries.

How can I get it to parse and add both categories separately?

edit: I notice that if the categories have a comma between them, it does create multiple categories. It only doesn't recognize that weird "»" symbol as a separator.

@Niehztog

[Niehztog]

Hello @drelephant ,

unfortunately multple categories are not yet supported by XPathBridge. Whenever your XPath expression returns multiple elements, only the first element is used and all others are omitted. Support for multiple elements/categories would be a new feature request.

You mentioned that a comma between the categories does in fact create multiple categories. I haven't tested it, but you can try to replace the other weird symbol by a comma with an expression like:

concat(.//span[@itemprop="applicationCategory"]//a[1],",",.//span[@itemprop="applicationCategory"]//a[2])

I made a test script here. This will output the first two categories as one element separated by a comma. Let me know if that helps you. Otherwise we would have to make changes to XPathBridge.

[dvikan]

thank you @Niehztog for taking time to help users and maintain this bridge