From: Diego <diego@...>
Date: 2008-11-03T13:48:40+09:00
Subject: Using XPath: find last text node of each paragraph under the root 	node.

I want to trim trailing whitespace at the end of all XHTML paragraphs.
I am using the REXML library.

Say I have the following in a valid XHTML file:

<p>hello <span>world</span> a </p>
<p>Hi there </p>
<p>The End </p>

I want to end up with this:

<p>hello <span>world</span> a</p>
<p>Hi there</p>
<p>The End</p>

So I was thinking what I could use XPath to get just the text nodes
that I want, then just trim the text, which would allow me to end up
with what I want (previous).

I started with the following XPath: //root/p/child::text()

Of course, the problem here is that it returns all text nodes that are
children of all p-tags. Which is this:

'hello '
' a '
'Hi there '
'The End '

Trying the following XPath gives me the last text node of the last
paragraph. Not the last text node of each paragraph that is a child of
the root node.

//root/p/child::text()[last()]

This only returns: 'The End '

What I would like to get from the XPath is therefore:

' a '
'Hi there '
'The End '

I have tried //root//p/child::text()[last()] on other XPath parsers,
and it works. Could just be a bug (or different interpretation of the
rules) by REXML?

Cheers, Diego