xpath to select nodes excluding by attribute value list

Question

I would like to know if there is shorter approach to selecting a list of nodes ignoring the ones that have an attribute value specified in a list

Working example:

/item[not(@uid='id1') and not(@uid='id2')] 

Desired alternative:

/item[not(@uid in('id1','id2'))] 

Answer 1

You can either use regex - if your xpath implementation supports it - or write

/item[not(@uid='id1' or @uid='id2')] 

which might be a bit shorter.

Answer 2

If the list of attribute names is very long, the following is a good way to handle this situation:

//item[not(contains('|attr1|attr2|attr3|attr4|attr5|attr6|attrN|',                      concat('|', @uid, '|')                     )            )]