Testing for a string in a particular element node - php

Question

in PHP Unit (using Selenium Server) i'm trying to check if a particular element node in xpath has a certain string value, for instance
<table>
<thead></thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>1</th>
<td>value 1</td>
<td>value 2</td>
<td>value c</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>2</th>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
</tbody>
with the above code, using the xpath
isElementPresent('//table/tbody/tr[last()-0]/td[last()-1]');
it would return true, if i changed tr[last()-0] to tr[last()-1] it would still return true,
naturally, the isElementPresent would be in a loop with the xpath generated in the loop as well (substituting the integer for $i and $j which are used in the for() loop) as as it is, that would be fine, however, what i want to check is that the has nothing in it
using the same html code above, if i change the xpath
isElementPresent('//table/tbody/tr[last()-$i]/td[last()-1 and text()="${nbsp}"]');
you would think that it would return true at //table/tbody/tr[last()-0]/td[last()-1 and text()="${nbsp}"] and false at //table/tbody/tr[last()-1]/td[last()-1 and text()="${nbsp}"] however here is the kicker
using Selenium IDE 1.10.0 Plugin for Firefox to check the xpath by putting it in the Target Box and hitting find (to check that it will locate the xpath when it should, //table/tbody/tr[last()-0]/td[last()-1 and text()="${nbsp}"] doesn't highlight the 2nd last td in the last tr, it highlights the first td in the last tr, as if the xpath was //table/tbody/tr[last()-0]/td[last()-2]
from my experiments, it seems to be treating the xapth like //table/tbody/tr[last()-0]/td[text()="${nbsp}"] which would only be the FIRST instance in which text is a blank space, not good if the 2nd tr was like
<tr>
<th>2</th>
<td>cows are my friends</td>
<td>let's go to my room pig!</td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
and i was to use isElementPresent('//table/tbody/tr[last()-0]/td[last()-1 and text()="${nbsp}"]'); it would still return true as its not looking at last()-1 but last()-0
so my question is, how can i check if a particular element node has a certain string
NOTE 1: i use last()-# cause on this page http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/xpath_syntax.asp it says IE5 and later says [0] is the first not and not [1] like Firefox or Chrome which in a sense makes sense since that's how an array's index works, for full compatibility, i start from the last Node and work backwards which last() would work with IE5 and later and the logic of moving backwards though the nodes should be the same (unless microsoft wants to redefine that logic)
NOTE 2: i am well aware that a simple fix is to add title or id attributes to the table however the page i'm making the test for was done by someone else, i would like to avoid modifying the page just to suit test cases
NOTE 3: the table i'm testing is populated using a JSON string so my test is when there is no data for the table, is it blank, if not, than the JSON string is adding data to the table when it shouldn't
EDIT 1: seems like ${nbsp} doesn't work in php, only in the Selenium IDE 1.10.0 Plugin seemed to recognize it however inserting a space by holding Alt and typing in 0160 worked just as fine
EDIT 2: for the time being i have added id attributes to the tags to get this working and it works perfectly fine with checking #id=[VALUE] and text()=[VALUE] but it would still be good to get this question answered as while i add id, title and/or class attributes to all my html tags the person who originally made the table i was testing obviously didn't and as i said in NOTE 2, 'i would like to avoid modifying the page just to suit test cases'

Answer 1

#Memor-X Use SimpleXML to load the xml. Then it should be easy to test in phpunit. If I was you I would build in dependency tests to validate the xml structure before testing the contents.