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A very brief introduction to some commonly used technologies used in translator development.

XPath

 <div id="names">
  <span class="editor">George Spelvin</span>,
  <span class="translator">Andrea Johnson</span>
 </div>
 <table>
  <tr class="odd">
   <td>Great Expectations</td>
   <td>Mediocre Plans</td>
  </tr>
 </table>

/ Separator between parts of the path
* match any tag
/ / one or more levels deeper (no space)
.. go up one level
[] match a tag that has this (the contents of the brackets)
@key an attribute named key
text() match a text node
[2] match the second matching node
[last()] match the last matching node
div[@class=“important”] match a <div> with the attribute class, with the value important.
td[contains(text(),“Expect”)] match a <td> which contains text that contains “Expect”

Plus much more. See the XPath specification and the XPath documentation of the Mozilla Developer Network.

Examples

/ /tr[@class=“odd”]/td
/ /table/ /td
/ /span[@class=“editor”]

Regular Expressions

. matches any character
[a-z01] matches any of the lowercase English letters and the numbers 0 and 1 (
() surround a match expression
+ Match one or more of the preceding expression
* Match 0 or more of the preceding expression
? Match 0 or 1 of the preceding expression