For the given XML how can I select c,d,g,h (which will be child tags of b not in j) using xpath?
XML
<a>
<b>
<c>select me</c>
<d>select me</d>
<e>do not select me</e>
<f>
<g>select me</g>
<h>select me</h>
</f>
</b>
<j>
<c>select me</c>
<d>select me</d>
<e>do not select me</e>
<f>
<g>select me</g>
<h>select me</h>
</f>
</j>
</a>
I thought of using following to grab the result but it doesn't give me g,h values
xpath.compile("//a/b/*[self::c or self::d or self::f/text()");
java code I used
import org.w3c.dom.*;
import javax.xml.xpath.*;
import javax.xml.parsers.*;
import java.io.IOException;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;
public class XPathDemo {
public static void main(String[] args)
throws ParserConfigurationException,SAXException,IOException,PathExpressionException {
DocumentBuilderFactory domFactory =
DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
domFactory.setNamespaceAware(true);
DocumentBuilder builder = domFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
Document doc = builder.parse("test.xml");
XPath xpath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
XPathExpression expr = xpath.compile("//a/b/*[self::c or self::d or self::f]/text()");
Object result = expr.evaluate(doc, XPathConstants.NODESET);
NodeList nodes = (NodeList) result;
for (int i = 0; i < nodes.getLength(); i++) {
System.out.println(nodes.item(i).getNodeValue());
}
}
}
Can anyone help me with this?
Thanks a lot!!!
Use this xpath if you want to select all c, d, g, h nodes:
"//c|//d|//g|//h"
Use this, if you want to specify the full path from the root:
"/a/b/c|/a/b/d|/a/b/f/g|/a/b/f/h"
Or if you want all c, d, g or h, which are within b:
"//b//c|//b//d|//b//g|//b//h"
Also, in your code: use nodes.item(i).getTextContent()
instead of GetNodeValue.
Use:
//a/b/*[not(self::e or self::f)]
|
//a/b/*/*[self::g or self::h]
In case you know the structure of the XML document well and it is true that the only grand-children that //a/b
can have are g
and/or h
, then this can be simplified to:
//a/b/*[not(self::e or self::f)]
|
//a/b/*/*
In XPath 2.0 this can be written even simpler as:
//a/b/(*[not(self::e or self::f)] | */*)
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