CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xmlxpath
miken32
miken32

Reputation: 42699

Print multiple matching element names

I'm attempting to print the names of multiple elements, but I can only convince XPath to output one.

Given this XML:

<xml>
    <foob>931</foob>
    <arba>478</arba>
    <zfoo>892</zfoo>
</xml>

I try this and get foob:

name(//*[contains(name(), "foo")])

I try this and get an error about an invalid expression:

//*[contains(name(), "foo")]/name()

Although this works fine: 

//*[contains(name(), "foo")]/text()

I'm on the command line, and have tried both xmllint and xpath (from Perl's XML-XPath module) with the same results.

How can I get both foob and zfoo returned?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 89

Answers (1)

kjhughes
kjhughes

Reputation: 111491

With XPath 1.0, your first XPath,

name(//*[contains(name(), "foo")])

results in just "foob" because XPath 1.0 passes only the first member of the selected nodeset to name(). To obtain a list of "foob" and "zfoo", you would have to iterate over the selected nodeset in the language hosting the XPath call -- XSLT, Python, Java, etc.

With XPath 2.0, your second XPath,

//*[contains(name(), "foo")]/name()

would work fine to obtain a list of "foob" and "zfoo" directly via XPath alone.

Upvotes: 2

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