XPath to return string concatenation of qualifying child node values
-
05-07-2019 - |
Question
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.
Solution
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.
OTHER TIPS
In XPath 2.0 :
string-join(/*/node()[not(self::p)], '')
/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.
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>