I have a bit of a tough xpath query (which I'm not entirely sure can be done).
I have the below xml
<Root>
<PersonOne Name='jon'/>
<PersonTwo Name='bob'/>
<JonDetails>some text</JonDetails>
<BobDetails>some details about Bob</BobDetails>
</Root>
I know it is a bit of a contrived example but the xml structure I am dealing with is fixed and I cannot change it.
Basically I'm trying to figure out the xpath to select the *Detail node for the name attribute in the PersonOne node.
So to do this I need to concat the atribute value of 'Name' in the PersonOne node with the constant Details to get 'JonDetails' as a node name.
I have this so far but it doesn't work but I think it is along the right lines.
/Root/*[contains(name(), concat(/Root/PersonOne/#Name, 'Details'))]
However, just to add to the fun it has to be a case insensitive match on the node name. I know this can be done with a translate function.
Any pointers in the right direction?
Jon
will this expression be better?
/Root/*[translate(name(), 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz') = translate(concat(/Root/PersonOne/#Name, 'details'), 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz')]
it looks for an exact match.
Just figured it out! It's not too pretty but it works.
/Root/*[contains(translate(name(), 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'), translate(concat(/Root/PersonOne/#Name, 'details'), 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'))]
If anyone can improve on this it would be good to see how.
Thanks
Related
I'm having some issues with XPath and import.io and I hope you'll be able to help me. :)
The html code:
<a href="page.php?var=12345">
For the moment, I manage to extract the content of the href ( page.php?var=12345 ) with this:
./td[3]/a[1]/#href
Though, I would like to just collect: 12345
substring might be the solution but it does not seem to work on import.io as I use it...
substring(./td[3]/a[1]/#href,13)
Any ideas of what the problem is?
Thank's a lot in advance!
Try using this for the xpath: (Have the field selected as Text)
.//*[#class='oeil']/a/#href
Then use this for your regex:
([^=]*)$
This will get you the ISBN number you are looking for.
import.io only support functions in XPath when they return a node list
Your path expression is fine, but perhaps it should be
substring(./td[3]/a[1]/#href,14)
"Does not seem to work" is not a very clear description of what is wrong. Do you get error messages? Is the output wrong? Do you have any code surrounding the path expression you could show?
You can use substring, but using substring-after() would be even better.
substring-after(/a/#href,'=')
assuming as input the tiny snippet you have shown:
<a href="page.php?var=12345"/>
will select
12345
and taking into account the structure of your input
substring-after(./td[3]/a[1]/#href,'=')
A leading . in a path expression selects only immediate child td nodes of the current context node. I trust you know what you are doing.
Edit: I think I found the answer but I'll leave the open for a bit to see if someone has a correction/improvement.
I'm using xpath in Talend's etl tool. I have xml like this:
<root>
<employee>
<benefits>
<benefit>
<benefitname>CDE</benefitname>
<benefit_start>2/3/2004</benefit_start>
</benefit>
<benefit>
<benefitname>ABC</benefitname>
<benefit_start>1/1/2001</benefit_start>
</benefit>
</benefits>
<dependent>
<benefits>
<benefit>
<benefitname>ABC</benefitname>
</benefit>
</dependent>
When parsing benefits for dependents, I want to get elements present in the employee's
benefit element. So in the example above, I want to get 1/1/2001 for the dependent's
start date. I want 1/1/2001, not 2/3/2004, because the dependent's benefit has benefitname ABC, matching the employee's benefit with the same benefitname.
What xpath, relative to /root/employee/dependent/benefits/benefit, will yield the value of
benefit_start for the benefit under parent employee that has the same benefit name as the
dependent benefit name? (Note I don't know ahead of time what the literal value will be, I can't just look for 'ABC', I have to match whatever value is in the dependent's benefitname element.
I'm trying:
../../../benefits/benefit[benefitname=??what??]/benefit_start
I don't know how to refer to the current node's ancestor in the middle of
the xpath (since I think "." at the point I have ??what?? will refer to
the benefit node of the employee/benefits.
EDIT: I think what I want is "current()/benefitname" where the ??what?? is. Seems to work with saxon, I haven't tried it in the etl tool yet.
Your XML is malformed, and I don't think you've described your siduation very well (the XPath you're trying has a bunch of ../../s at the beginning, but you haven't said what the context node is, whether you're iterating through certain nodes, or what.
Supposing the current context node were an employee element, you could select benefit_starts that match dependent benefits with
benefits/benefit[benefitname = ../../dependent/benefits/benefit/benefitname]
/benefit_start
If the current context node is a benefit element in a dependents section, and you want to get the corresponding benefit_start for just the current benefit element, you can do:
../../../benefits/benefit[benefitname = current()/benefitname]/benefit_start
Which is what I think you've already discovered.
I am looking to find all attributes of an element that match a certain pattern.
So for an element
<element s2="1" name="aaaa" id="1" />
<element s3="1" name="aaaa" id="2" />
I would like to be able to find all attributes that start with 's' (returning the value of s1 for the first element and s3 for the value of the second element).
If this is outside of xpath's ability please let me know.
Use:
element/#*[starts-with(name(), 's')]
This XPath expression selects all atribute nodes whose name starts with the string 's' and that are attributes of elements named element that are children of the current node.
starts-with() is a standard function in XPath 1.0
element/#*[substring(name(), 1,1) = "s"]
will match any attribute that starts with 's'.
The function starts-with() might look better than using substring()
I've tested the given answers from both #Dimitre-Novatchev and #Ledhund, using lxml.html module in Python.
Both element/#*[starts-with(name(), 's')] and element/#*[substring(name(), 1,1) = "s"] return only the values of s2 and s3. You won't be able to know which value belong to which attribute.
I think in practice I would be more interested in finding the elements themselves that contain the attributes of names starting with specific characters rather than just their values.
To achieve that is very simple, just add /.. at the end,
element/#*[starts-with(name(), "s")]/..
or
element/#*[starts-with(name(), "s")]/parent::*
or
element/#*[starts-with(name(), "s")]/parent::node()
None from above worked for me.
So I did not some changes and it worked for me. :)
/*:UserCustomField[starts-with(#name, 'purchaseDate')]
I'm not very familiar with xpath. But I was working with xpath expressions and setting them in a database. Actually it's just the BAM tool for biztalk.
Anyway, I have an xml which could look like:
<File>
<Element1>element1<Element1>
<Element2>element2<Element2>
<Element3>
<SubElement>sub1</SubElement>
<SubElement>sub2</SubElement>
<SubElement>sub3</SubElement>
<Element3>
</File>
I was wondering if there is a way to use an xpath expression of getting all the SubElements concatted? At the moment, I am using:
/*[local-name()='File']/*[local-name()='Element3']/*[local-name()='SubElement']
This works if it only has one index. But apparently my xml sometimes has more nodes, so it gives NULL. I could just use
/*[local-name()='File']/*[local-name()='Element3']/*[local-name()='SubElement'][0]
but I need all the nodes. Is there a way to do this?
Thanks a lot!
Edit: I changed the XML, I was wrong, it's different, it should look like this:
<item>
<element1>el1</element1>
<element2>el2</element2>
<element3>el3</element3>
<element4>
<subEl1>subel1a</subEl1>
<subEl2>subel2a</subEl2>
</element4>
<element4>
<subEl1>subel1b</subEl1>
<subEl2>subel2b</subEl2>
</element4>
</item>
And I need to have a one line code to get a result like: "subel2a subel2b";
I need the one line because I set this xpath expression as an xml attribute (not my choice, it's specified). I tried string-join but it's not really working.
string-join(/file/Element3/SubElement, ',')
/File/Element3/SubElement will match all of the SubElement elements in your sample XML. What are you using to evaluate it?
If your evaluation method is subject to the "first node rule", then it will only match the first one. If you are using a method that returns a nodeset, then it will return all of them.
You can get all SubElements by using:
//SubElement
But this won't keep them grouped together how you want. You will want to do a query for all elements that contain a SubElement (basically do a search for the parent of any SubElements).
//parent::SubElement
Once you have that, you could (depending on your programming language) loop through the parents and concatenate the SubElements.
Can anyone please suggest an XPath expression format that returns a string value containing the concatenated values of certain qualifying child nodes of an element, but ignoring others:
<div>
This text node should be returned.
<em>And the value of this element.</em>
And this.
<p>But this paragraph element should be ignored.</p>
</div>
The returned value should be a single string:
This text node should be returned. And the value of this element. And this.
Is this possible in a single XPath expression?
Thanks.
In XPath 2.0 :
string-join(/*/node()[not(self::p)], '')
In XPath 1.0:
You can use
/div//text()[not(parent::p)]
to capture the wanted text nodes. The concatenation itself cannot be done in XPath 1.0, I recommend doing it in the host application.
/div//text()
double slash forces to extract text regardless of intermediate nodes
This look that works:
Using as context /div/:
text() | em/text()
Or without the use of context:
/div/text() | /div/em/text()
If you want to concat the first two strings, use this:
concat(/div/text(), /div/em/text())
If you want all children except p, you can try the following...
string-join(//*[name() != 'p']/text(), "")
which returns...
This text node should be returned.
And the value of this element.
And this.
I know this comes a bit late, but I figure my answer could still be relevant. I recently ran into a similar problem. And because I use scrapy in Python 3.6, which does not support xpath 2.0, I could not use the string-join function suggested in several online answers.
I ended up finding a simple workaround (as shown below) which I did not see in any of the stackoverflow answers, that's why I'm sharing it.
temp_selector_list = response.xpath('/div')
string_result = [''.join(x.xpath(".//text()").extract()) for x in temp_selector_list]
Hope this helps!
You could use a for-each loop as well and assemble the values in a variable like this
<xsl:variable name="newstring">
<xsl:for-each select="/div//text()">
<xsl:value-of select="."/>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:variable>