XPath with optional element in hierarchy

As in this Stack Overflow answer imagine that you need to select a particular table and then all the rows of it. Due to the permissiveness of HTML, all three of th开发者_开发技巧e following are legal markup:

<table id="foo"><tr>...</tr></table>
<table id="foo"><tbody><tr>...</tr></tbody></table>
<table id="foo"><tr>...</tr><tbody><tr>...</tr></tbody></table>

You are worried about tables nested in tables, and so don't want to use an XPath like

table[@id="foo"]//tr.

If you could specify your desired XPath as a regex, it might look something like:

table[@id="foo"](/tbody)?/tr

In general, how can you specify an XPath expression that allows an optional element in the hierarchy of a selector?

To be clear, I'm not trying to solve a real-world problem or select a specific element of a specific document. I'm asking for techniques to solve a class of problems.

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I don't see why you can't use this:

//table[@id='foo']/tr|//table[@id='foo']/tbody/tr

If you want one expression without node set union:

//tr[(.|parent::tbody)[1]/parent::table[@id='foo']]

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In XPath 2.0, the optional step can be expressed as (tbody|.).

//table[@id="foo"]/(tbody|.)/tr

XPathTester.com demo

The pipe (|) denotes union (of two node-sets), the dot (.) denotes identity step (returning just what the previous step did).

This can be expanded to include more optional elements at once:

//table[@id="foo"]/(thead|tbody|tfoot|.)/tr

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Use:

   //table[@id="foo"]/*[self::tbody or self::thead or self::tfoot]/tr
   |
   //table[@id="foo"]/tr

Select any tr element that is a child of any table that has an id attribute "foo" or any tr element that is a child of a tbody that is a child any table.