Simultaneously escape double and single quotes in Xpath

Because you are using string manipulation to build your XPath expression, it's your responsibility that the expression is valid XPath. This expression:

//*[contains(.,concat('Fat"',"her's son"))]

Selects:

<div>Fat"her's son</div>

Test in here

It would be a better approach to use an XPath string variable, but it looks like R doesn't have an API for that, even using libxml.

The key here is realising that with xml2 you can write back into the parsed html with html-escaped characters. This function will do the trick. It's longer than it needs to be because I've included comments and some type checking / converting logic.

contains_text <- function(node_set, find_this)
{
  # Ensure we have a nodeset
  if(all(class(node_set) == c("xml_document", "xml_node")))
    node_set %<>% xml_children()

  if(class(node_set) != "xml_nodeset")
    stop("contains_text requires an xml_nodeset or xml_document.")

  # Get all leaf nodes
  node_set %<>% xml_nodes(xpath = "//*[not(*)]")

  # HTML escape the target string
  find_this %<>% {gsub("\"", "&quot;", .)}

  # Extract, HTML escape and replace the nodes
  lapply(node_set, function(node) xml_text(node) %<>% {gsub("\"", "&quot;", .)})

  # Now we can define the xpath and extract our target nodes
  xpath <- paste0("//*[contains(text(), \"", find_this, "\")]")
  new_nodes <- html_nodes(node_set, xpath = xpath)

  # Since the underlying xml_document is passed by pointer internally,
  # we should unescape any text to leave it unaltered
  xml_text(node_set) %<>% {gsub("&quot;", "\"", .)}
  return(new_nodes)
}

Now:

library(rvest)
library(xml2)

html %>% xml2::read_html() %>% contains_text(target)
#> {xml_nodeset (1)}
#> [1] <div>Fat"her's son</div>
html %>% xml2::read_html() %>% contains_text(target) %>% xml_text()
#> [1] "Fat\"her's son"

---

ADDENDUM

This is an alternative method, which is an implementation of the method suggested by @Alejandro but allows arbitrary targets. It has the merit of leaving the xml document untouched, and is a little faster than the above method, but involves the kind of string parsing that an xml library is supposed to prevent. It works by taking the target, splitting it after each " and ', then enclosing each fragment in the opposite type of quote to the one it contains before pasting them all back together with commas and inserting them into an XPath concatenate function.

library(stringr)

safe_xpath <- function(target)
{
  target                                 %<>%
  str_replace_all("\"", "&quot;&break;") %>%
  str_replace_all("'", "&apo;&break;")   %>%
  str_split("&break;")                   %>%
  unlist()

  safe_pieces    <- grep("(&quot;)|(&apo;)", target, invert = TRUE)
  contain_quotes <- grep("&quot;", target)
  contain_apo    <- grep("&apo;", target)

  if(length(safe_pieces) > 0) 
      target[safe_pieces] <- paste0("\"", target[safe_pieces], "\"")

  if(length(contain_quotes) > 0)
  {
    target[contain_quotes] <- paste0("'", target[contain_quotes], "'")
    target[contain_quotes] <- gsub("&quot;", "\"", target[contain_quotes])
  }

  if(length(contain_apo) > 0)
  {
    target[contain_apo] <- paste0("\"", target[contain_apo], "\"")
    target[contain_apo] <- gsub("&apo;", "'", target[contain_apo])
  }

  fragment <- paste0(target, collapse = ",")
  return(paste0("//*[contains(text(),concat(", fragment, "))]"))
}

Now we can generate a valid xpath like this:

safe_xpath(target)
#> [1] "//*[contains(text(),concat('Fat\"',\"her'\",\"s son\"))]"

so that

html %>% xml2::read_html() %>% html_nodes(xpath = safe_xpath(target))
#> {xml_nodeset (1)}
#> [1] <div>Fat"her's son</div>

use quote() for xpath query

library(XML)

only single quote inside string

target1 <- "Father's son"
doc1 <- XML::newHTMLDoc()
newXMLNode("div", 1, parent = getNodeSet(doc1, "//body"), doc = doc1)
newXMLNode("div", target1, parent = getNodeSet(doc1, "//body"), doc = doc1)
xpath_query1 <- paste0('//*[ contains(text(), ', '"', target1, '"', ')]')
getNodeSet(doc1, xpath_query1)

both single and double quote inside string

target2 <- "Fat\"her's son"
doc2 <- XML::newHTMLDoc()
newXMLNode("div", 1, parent = getNodeSet(doc2, "//body"), doc = doc2)
newXMLNode("div", target2, parent = getNodeSet(doc2, "//body"), doc = doc2)
xpath_query2 <- quote('//body/*[contains(.,concat(\'Fat"\',"her\'s son"))]')
getNodeSet(doc2, xpath_query2)

Output:

getNodeSet(doc1, xpath_query1)
# [[1]]
# <div>Father's son</div> 
# 
# attr(,"class")
# [1] "XMLNodeSet"

getNodeSet(doc2, xpath_query2)
# [[1]]
# <div>Fat"her's son</div> 
# 
# attr(,"class")
# [1] "XMLNodeSet"