USER MANUALS


Tags with Evaluated Attributes

In some cases it is useful to be able to define a pattern that matches the HTML code only in case the HTML tags have a specific value for some of their attributes. For example, given an HTML page that defines a select element:

HTML page with a select
<select name="format">
    <option value=" Hardcover ">Hardcover</option>
    <option value=" Paperback " selected>Paperback</option>
 </select>

The value of the selected option can be extracted. To do that, a new custom option tag can be defined to match only the option element that includes the selected attribute; but a simpler syntax can be used, thus avoiding the creation of a new tagset. When defining a DEXTL pattern that includes a tag, the values of the attributes of the tag can be added after the tag, in the following form:

Syntax for the evaluated attributes
TAG("value"==attribute)

This way, to obtain the selected option from the page the pattern should be this one

Syntax for the pattern that matches the selected option
OPTION(""==SELECTED)

It can be seen how the definition of a new tag and tagset has been avoided in this case, by using this syntax.

Tag attributes can be checked at the same time, by separating them with commas. In the following example, the pattern matches the HTML code where the value of the option is ” Paperback ” AND where the option has been selected. Therefore, there will be just one match (if the selected option is a ” Paperback ” item) or none (if the selected option has another value attribute):

Syntax for the pattern that matches the selected option, but only if its value is ‘Paperback’
OPTION(" Paperback "==value, ""==SELECTED)

Also, this can be combined with the attribute extraction syntax discussed in the section Extracting Tag Attributes. For example, to extract the value (not the text) of the selected option into the FIELD1 attribute:

Syntax for the pattern that extracts the selected value
OPTION(:FIELD1=value, ""==SELECTED)
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