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'))]

Solution 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.

Solution 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, '|')
                    )
           )]

Solution 3

Maybe something like this??

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

Comments

[Arne]

works, but risky for changes, as contains(x, y) is true for non-existing y.

[Aitorito]

@Arne This one is the shortest but in what cases would it fail? The attribute we use to filter is a unique id without spaces

[Aitorito]

You were right, the other method if i had two items like 'id1' and 'id11' it would ignore both by error

[Nickmaovich]

I needed to build very long XPath in .NET. Instead of using stuff like LINQ Aggregate method with seed, you can just simply join strings with '|', add trailing and leading, and use it. Thanks!