How to use XPath to filter elements by TextContent? get parent by axis?
Solution 1
If I wanna get a "filtered" subset of the item elements from this XML, how could I use an XPath expression to directly address that?
An example XPath expression:
/*/item[id/@isInStock='true']/category/text()
This XPath expression selects all text-node children of all <category>
elements of all <item>
elements the isInStock
attribute of whose id
child has a value of 'true'
and (the id
elements) that are children of the top element of the XML document.
Another question is : how could I refer to the parent node properly?
Use:
parent::node()
or simply
..
Solution 2
Java.
import javax.xml.xpath.XPath;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathConstants;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathExpression;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactory;
import org.w3c.dom.Node;
Following XPath expression can be used to filter element by text contents.
**String xPathString = "/root/item/category[text()='Bouquet Balloon']";**
XPath xPath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
XPathExpression xPathExpression = xPath.compile(xPathString);
Get the result evaluated to the a required type,
Object result = xPathExpression.evaluate(getDrugBankXMLDoc(), XPathConstants.NODE);
Get the parent of the selected Node (import org.w3c.dom.Node;),
Node baloon = (Node)result;
if (baloon != null)
{
baloon = baloon.getParentNode();
}
Solution 3
To select the item, You can continue the path after the predicate to jump back to the parent of the found id(s)
XPathExpression expr = xpath.compile("/root/item/id[@isInStock='true']/../text()");
When you evaluate this, it should return a NodeList containing the filtered item Nodes (and their subtrees), which you can then iterate through.
Michael Mao
Hi all. I now work at IBM as Associative Support Software Engineer in Sydney. I am always interested in developing my programming skills after work (technical support for Cognos). So maybe I am not a good programmer, but I am sure a good questioner :)
Updated on June 27, 2022Comments
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Michael Mao almost 2 years
I've found a similar question on SO, however, that seems not exactly what I wanna achieve:
Say, this is a sample XML file:
<root> <item> <id isInStock="true">10001</id> <category>Loose Balloon</category> </item> <item> <id isInStock="true">10001</id> <category>Bouquet Balloon</category> </item> <item> <id isInStock="true">10001</id> <category>Loose Balloon</category> </item> </root>
If I wanna get a "filtered" subset of the item elements from this XML, how could I use an XPath expression to directly address that?
XPathExpression expr = xpath.compile("/root/item/category/text()");
I now know this would evaluate to be the collection of all the TextContent from the categories, however, that means I have to use a collection to store the values, then iterate, then go back to grab other related info such as the item id again.
Another question is : how could I refer to the parent node properly?
Say, this xpath expression would get me the collection of all the id nodes, right? But what I want is the collection of item nodes:
XPathExpression expr = xpath.compile("/root/item/id[@isInStock='true']");
I know I should use the "parent" axis to refer to that, but I just cannot make it right...
Is there a better way of doing this sort of thing? Learning the w3cschools tutorials now...
Sorry I am new to XPath in Java, and thanks a lot in advance.