XPath - Selecting elements that equal a value
In Xpath, I am wanting to select elements that equal a specific value.
Sample XML data:
<aaa id="11" >
<aaa id="21" >
<aaa id="31" ></aaa>
<bbb id="32" >
<aaa id="41" ></aaa>
<bbb id="42" ></bbb>
<ccc id="43" ></ccc>
<ddd id="44" >qwerty</ddd>
<ddd id="45" ></ddd>
<ddd id="46" ></ddd>
</bbb>
</aaa>
<bbb id="22" >
<aaa id="33" >qwerty</aaa>
<bbb id="34" ></bbb>
<ccc id="35" ></ccc>
<ddd id="36" ></ddd>
<ddd id="37" ></ddd>
<ddd id="38" ></ddd>
</bbb>
<ccc id="23" >qwerty</ccc>
<ccc id="24" ></ccc>
</aaa>
Now, using the XPath:
//ccc[.='qwerty']
I get the correct, expected results:
Name Value
ccc qwerty
Now, using the XPath:
//aaa[.='qwerty']
I get unexpected results:
Name Value
aaa
aaa qwerty
And what I am particularly interested, is how to select any element with that value
XPath:
//*[.='qwerty']
I get very strange unexpected results:
Name Value
aaa
bbb
ddd qwerty
bbb qwerty
aaa qwerty
ccc qwerty
Can someone explain these results, and how to fix my XPath expressions to get more expected results?
. = is different than XPath text() =. See matching text nodes is different than matching string values to learn why.
The XPath spec. defines the string value of an element as the concatenation (in document order) of all of its text-node descendents.
This explains the "strange results".
"Better" results can be obtained using the expressions below:
//*[text() = 'qwerty']
The above selects every element in the document that has at least one text-node child with value 'qwerty'.
//*[text() = 'qwerty' and not(text()[2])]
The above selects every element in the document that has only one text-node child and its value is: 'qwerty'.
Try
//*[text()='qwerty'] because . is your current element
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text()is one of the possible node-tests in XPath, meaning "is this a text node?". Other nodetests arecomment(),processing-instruction(), or justnode().