XPath : select all following siblings until another sibling

Question

Here is an excerpt of my xml :

<node/> <node/> <node id="1">content</node> <node/> <node/> <node/> <node id="2">content</node> <node/> <node/> 

I am positioned in the node[@id='1']. I need an Xpath to match all the <node/> elements until the next not empty node (here node[@id='2']).

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Edit: the @id attributes are only to explain my problem more clearly, but are not in my original XML. I need a solution which does not use the @id attributes.

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I do not want to match the empty siblings after node[@id='2'], so I can't use a naive following-sibling::node[text()=''].

How can I achieve this ?

Answer 1

You could do it this way:

 ../node[not(text()) and preceding-sibling::node[@id][1][@id='1']] 

where '1' is the id of the current node (generate the expression dynamically).

The expression says:

• from the current context go to the parent
• select those child nodes that
• have no text and
• from all "preceding sibling nodes that have an id" the first one must have an id of 1

If you are in XSLT you can select from the following-sibling axis because you can use the current() function:

<!-- the for-each is merely to switch the current node --> <xsl:for-each select="node[@id='1']">   <xsl:copy-of select="     following-sibling::node[       not(text()) and       generate-id(preceding-sibling::node[@id][1])       =       generate-id(current())     ]   " /> </xsl:for-each> 

or simpler (and more efficient) with a key:

<xsl:key    name="kNode"    match="node[not(text())]"    use="generate-id(preceding-sibling::node[@id][1])" />  <xsl:copy-of select="key('kNode', generate-id(node[@id='1']))" />