Suppose I have the following XML:
<book category="CLASSICS">
<title lang="it">Purgatorio</title>
<author>Dante Alighieri</author>
<year>1308</year>
<price>30.00</price>
</book>
<book category="CLASSICS">
<title lang="it">Inferno</title>
<author>Dante Alighieri</author>
<year>1308</year>
<price>30.00</price>
</book>
<book category="CHILDREN">
<title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
<author>J K. Rowling</author>
<year>2005</year>
<price>29.99</price>
</book>
<book category="WEB">
<title lang="en">XQuery Kick Start</title>
<author>James McGovern</author>
<author>Per Bothner</author>
<author>Kurt Cagle</author>
<author>James Linn</author>
<author>Vaidyanathan Nagarajan</author>
<year>2003</year>
<price>49.99</price>
</book>
<book category="WEB">
<title lang="en">Learning XML</title>
<author>Erik T. Ray</author>
<year>2003</year>
<price>39.95</price>
</book>
I would like to do an xpath that gets back all book nodes that have a title node with a language attribute of "it".
My attempt looked something like this:
//book[title[@lang='it']]
But that didn't work. I expect to get back the nodes:
<book category="CLASSICS">
<title lang="it">Purgatorio</title>
<author>Dante Alighieri</author>
<year>1308</year>
<price>30.00</price>
</book>
<book category="CLASSICS">
<title lang="it">Inferno</title>
<author>Dante Alighieri</author>
<year>1308</year>
<price>30.00</price>
</book>
Any hints?
Best Answer
Try
This reads:
book
elementstitle
lang
"it"
You may find this helpful — it's an article entitled "XPath in Five Paragraphs" by Ronald Bourret.
But in all honesty,
//book[title[@lang='it']]
and the above should be equivalent, unless your XPath engine has "issues." So it could be something in the code or sample XML that you're not showing us -- for example, your sample is an XML fragment. Could it be that the root element has a namespace, and you aren't counting for that in your query? And you only told us that it didn't work, but you didn't tell us what results you did get.