html parsing - xpath find node that does not contain child

Question

I'm trying to create some xpath that will find all a tags that do not contain img tags, so that something such as

<a href="http://aol.com">link</a>

matches, but

<a href="http://yahoo.com"><img src="http://yahoo.com/logo.png"></a>

does not.

Of course I could do this in a two-part search but I'm sure there must be some way to do this with xpath.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5464272/xpath-find-node-that-does-not-contain-child

Answer 1

//a[not(img)]

Try and avoid the // if you can, though. Also note this will only exclude as that directly contain imgs.