I want to get elements from a website using XPath expressions. I’m using the built-in Microsoft library MSXML2 to do it, but doesn´t have a getElementByXpath() method. I’ve found this very good function getXPathElement() shown below to get element by Xpath in this old thread and it works fine only with full xpath expressions, but I need to find elements by Xpath that contains some text.

For example, if I want to get the element that contains the text HTML Editors from the url https://www.w3schools.com/html/, the full Xpath = "/html/body/div[4]/div/div/a[3]" but one option of Xpath based on a text could be Xpath = "//a[text()[contains(.,'HTML Editors')]]"

With this second XPath, the function fails. Is there a way to find this kind of Xpath expressions?

BTW: I know that in Selenium there is that option, but for what I’ve seen, that implies install Selenium driver in a tricky way since there is no a direct binding for VBA and if possible I’d like to avoid other installations.

This is my current code:

Sub Main()
Dim url As String
Dim oHttp As New MSXML2.XMLHTTP60
Dim elem As HTMLBaseElement


    url = "https://www.w3schools.com/html/"
    oHttp.Open "GET", url, False
    oHttp.send
    
    Dim html As New HTMLDocument
    html.body.innerHTML = oHttp.responseText
    Set elem = getXPathElement("/html/body/div[4]/div/div/a[3]", html)

    Debug.Print elem.innerText
    
End Sub

Public Function getXPathElement(sXPath As String, objElement As Object) As HTMLBaseElement
     Dim sXPathArray() As String
 
    Dim sNodeName As String
     Dim sNodeNameIndex As String
     Dim sRestOfXPath As String
     Dim lNodeIndex As Long
     Dim lCount As Long
 
    ' Split the xpath statement
     sXPathArray = Split(sXPath, "/")
     sNodeNameIndex = sXPathArray(1)
     If Not InStr(sNodeNameIndex, "[") > 0 Then
         sNodeName = sNodeNameIndex
         lNodeIndex = 1
     Else
         sXPathArray = Split(sNodeNameIndex, "[")
         sNodeName = sXPathArray(0)
         lNodeIndex = CLng(Left(sXPathArray(1), Len(sXPathArray(1)) - 1))
     End If
     sRestOfXPath = Right(sXPath, Len(sXPath) - (Len(sNodeNameIndex) + 1))
 
    Set getXPathElement = Nothing
     For lCount = 0 To objElement.ChildNodes().Length - 1
         If UCase(objElement.ChildNodes().Item(lCount).nodeName) = UCase(sNodeName) Then
             If lNodeIndex = 1 Then
                 If sRestOfXPath = "" Then
                     Set getXPathElement = objElement.ChildNodes().Item(lCount)
                 Else
                     Set getXPathElement = getXPathElement(sRestOfXPath, objElement.ChildNodes().Item(lCount))
                 End If
             End If
             lNodeIndex = lNodeIndex - 1
         End If
     Next lCount
 End Function