XPath wildcards on node name

Question

I want to grab a node from my XML file, the node has a prefix such as "latest_", but this may change and I'm keen for my XSLT to be as fluid as possible. Here's the XPath I want to use:

/data/stats/*_cost

This should match latest_cost, newest_cost, anything_cost, is there a way of doing this?

Cheers :-)

Solution 1

This is the correct XPath 1.0 expression which selects an element with the last 5 character of name equal to "_cost" in any namespace.

/data/stats/*[substring(name(), string-length(name()) - 4) = '_cost']

Solution 2

With XPath 1.0 you can use /data/stats/*[substring-after(name(), '_cost') = ''] pattern. That checks if the element's name ends with the _cost suffix.

In XPath 2.0 there is fn:ends-with(str, str) and your corresponding expression will be *[ends-with(name(), '_cost')].

Solution 3

You could also use contains

e.g

/data/stats[contains(.,'_cost')] 

Solution 4

The above did not work for me. I had to "slightly" modify that as follows:

/data/stats/*[contains(name(),'_cost')]

View more solutions

Comments

[Younes]

Depends on if XPath 2.0 is available in your environment. XPath 1.0 doesn't allow this and 2.0 does.

[Alex Nikolaenkov]

As for expressions like *_cost neither XPath 1.0 nor XPath 2.0 allows them.

[Alex Nikolaenkov]

. stands for all text content and this expression will match all the stats nodes which text content contains _const substring. No guarantees about postion and node names.

[Ben Everard]

I went with this in the end [contains(local-name(),'_cost')], it doesn't discriminate against position which is a shame, but in the context of its use that doesn't really matter.

[Ben Everard]

Thanks for your answer, contains worked well for me as it checked if the string exists as well. Also my environment doesn't appear to have XPath 2. Cheers anyway :-)

[Admin]

as @ILMV points out, this will select an element without "_cost" in its name. Check my answer.

[Admin]

This is wrong. This selects a stats element cointaining "_cost" in its string value. Check my answer.

[Ben Everard]

Fair point, I've input this into my application and it does what I need it to without the other disadvantages, see my comment to reqsquare. Thanks.

[halfer]

+1 and thanks to @user357812 - this has been very helpful to my similar use case (matching attribute suffixes). How to do this is here if anyone is interested.

[kletnoe]

[substring-after(name(), '_cost') = ''] This is also true for any name() that does not contain '_cost', -1

[Si8]

I tried this: <xsl:for-each select="substring(name(.), string-length(name(.)) - 1) = 'grp'"> I get the error: ` XPTY0020: Required item type of the context item for the child axis is node(); supplied value has item type xs:boolean`

[Dalmazio]

For completeness, what if the user wants to search for a prefix 'cost_' instead of suffix? How would the above XPath 1.0 expression change? I'm guessing: /data/stats/*[substring(name(), 4) = 'cost_']