XPath - All following siblings except first specific elements

Question

Let's say I'm querying an xhtml document, and I want to query all of the siblings following a table with id='target'. Also, I neither want the first <table> sibling nor the first <ol> sibling of this particular element. Here's the best I could come up with:

//table[@id='target']/following-sibling::*[not(self::table[1]) and not(self::ol[1])]

However, this isn't returning any results when it should. Obviously I'm not understanding some of the syntax for this (I couldn't find a good source of information). I would certainly appreciate it if someone more experienced with XPath syntax could give me a hand. Also, for purely academic purposes, I'd be curious what the above is actually doing.

UPDATE:
See LarsH's answer for the explanation of why my XPath wasn't working, and see Dimitre's answer for the accepted solution.

Answer 1

Use:

 /table[@id='target']/following-sibling::*[not(self::table) and not(self::ol)] 
| 
 /table[@id='target']/following-sibling::table[position() > 1]
|
 /table[@id='target']/following-sibling::ol[position() > 1]

This selects all the following siblings of the table that are not table and are not ol and all the following table siblings with position 2 or greater and all the following ol siblings with position 2 or greater.

Which is exactly what you want: all following siblings with the exception of the first table following sibling and the first ol following siblings.

This is pure XPath 1.0 and not using any XSLT functions.

Answer 2

Answering the second question first: what the above is doing is selecting all following siblings that are neither table nor ol elements.

Here's why: self::table[1] selects the context node's self (iff it passes the table element name test) and filters to select only the first node along the self:: axis. There is at most one node on the self:: axis passing the element name test, so the [1] is redundant. self::table[1] selects the context node whenever it is a table element, regardless of its position among its siblings. So not(self::table[1]) returns false whenever the context node is a table element, regardless of its position among siblings.

Similarly for self::ol[1].

How to do what you're trying to do: @John Kugelman's answer is almost correct, but misses the fact that we must ignore sibling elements before and including table[@id='target']. I don't think it's possible to do correctly in pure XPath 1.0. Do you have the possibility to use XPath 2.0? If you're working in a browser, the answer is generally no.

Some workarounds would be:

• Skip the first following table sibling and the first following ol sibling by filtering on some other basis, such as their attributes;
• Select //table[@id='target'] as a nodeset, return it to the host environment (i.e. outside of XPath, e.g. in JavaScript), loop through that nodeset; inside the loop: select following-sibling::* via XPath, iterate through that outside of XPath, and test each result (outside of XPath) to see if it is the first table or ol.
• Select //table[@id='target'] as a nodeset, return it to the host environment (i.e. outside of XPath, e.g. in JavaScript), loop through that nodeset; inside the loop: select generate-id(following-sibling::table[1]) and generate-id(following-sibling::ol[1]) via XPath, receive those values into JS variables t1id and o1id, and construct a string for the XPath expression using the form 'following-sibling::*[generate-id() != ' + t1id + ' and generate-id() != ' + o1id + ']'. Select that string in XPath and you have your answer! :-p

Update: A solution is possible in XSLT 1.0 - see @Dimitre's.

Answer 3

There's only going to be one node when you use the self:: axis, so I believe self::*[1] will always be true. Every node is going to be the first (and only) node on its own self:: axis. This means your bracketed expression is equivalent to [not(self::table) and not(self::ol)], meaning all the tables and lists get filtered out.

I don't have a test environment set up, but off the top of my head this might do better:

/table[@id='target']/following-sibling::*
    [not(self::table and not(preceding-sibling::table)) and
     not(self::ol    and not(preceding-sibling::ol))]

It'll need some tweaking, but the idea is to filter out tables that do not have preceding-sibling tables, and ols that do not have preceding-sibling ols.