use wildcard to match attribute in xpath

Question

I am working on an asp.net application based on .net 2.0.

And I meet some problems when I process the XML.

Suppose I have XML like this:

<person name="xxxyx" age="32" />

<person name="zzz" age="32" />

<person name="yyyxx" age="32" />

Now I want to select the person whose name contains yx

How do I use xpath to implement it?

I only know this expression will match the person whose name is exactly "yx":

"//person[name='yx'"]"

How to make the fuzzy search?

BTW, any idea to sort the matched person by the specified attribute like "name"?

Answer 1

Like @Utkanos suggested //person[contains(@name, 'yx')] should match the nodes you want.

XPath itself is, at least at my knowledge, not capable and not intended to provide order on nodes, but instead returns node-sets which are "unordered collection of nodes without duplicates" (see 1 and comments). However in version 2.0 there might be changes to this 2 with which I am not familiar.

Assuming the sorting should be done in an XSL transformation you could use <xsl:sort /> like this:

<xsl:apply-templates select="//person[contains(@name, 'yx')]">
    <xsl:sort select="@name" />
</xsl:apply-templates>

There are some more attributes on <xsl:sort /> documented here: http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt#sorting