[kiwidude]

Ok, here is an xpath "challenge" for someone (I need to go do some other things so if someone solves it for me in the meantime I shall be happy!)... lets say you have this html:

          <strong>Alex Cross</strong>
          <br>
          1.
          <a href="/p/james-patterson/along-came-spider.htm">Along Came a Spider</a>
          <span class="year">
            (
            <a href="/years/1992.htm">1992</a>
            )
          </span>
          <br>
          2.
          <a href="/p/james-patterson/kiss-girls.htm">Kiss the Girls</a>
          <span class="year">
            (
            <a href="/years/1994.htm">1994</a>
            )
          </span>
          <br>

Now lets say that you are iterating through each book in that page, using the <a> tag for the title above as your "root". Then you can extract the following with xpath:

title: text()
pubdate: following-sibling::span[@class="year"]/a/text()
series name: ../strong/text()
series #: ???

For series number I thought I could do something like:
preceding-sibling::text()

but that doesn't give me any results. Any other suggestions?