XPath for href link

Question

I got for example

<a href="target.php">News</a>
<a href="more.php">More</a>

What would be the most efficient way of extracting the href based on the value between <a></a> (the atomic data) with XPath

Answer 1

Question interpretation:

• "Most efficient" is taken to mean in a programmer's time sense, not in a performance sense.
• "The value between" is taken to mean the string between the a tags.

This XPath selects all a elements,

//a

This XPath selects all a elements whose string value is "News":

//a[.='News']

This XPath selects all href attributes of all a elements whose string value is "News"¹:

//a[.='News']/@href

_{^{1. Credit: @localghost posted correct answer in comments}}