How do I select an XML-node based on its content?

Question

How can I use XPath to select an XML-node based on its content?

If I e.g. have the following xml and I want to select the <author>-node that contains Ritchie to get the author's full name:

<books> <book isbn='0131103628'> <title>The C Programming Language</title> <authors> <author>Ritchie, Dennis M.</author> <author>Kernighan, Brian W.</author> </authors> </book> <book isbn='1590593898'> <title>Joel on Software</title> <authors> <author>Spolsky, Joel</author> </authors> </book> </books>

aku · Accepted Answer · 2008-08-27 13:09:53Z

23

/books/book/authors/author[contains(., 'Ritchie')]

or

//author[contains(., 'Ritchie')]

edited Aug 27, 2008 at 13:09

answered Aug 27, 2008 at 13:04

aku

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5 Comments

Oliver Over a year ago

For XPath newbies such as myself it might be valuable to note that the . is a shorter alias for text() - so yes, this answer does the right thing.

sites Over a year ago

where could I read a complete and friendly reference of these functions?

TheMaskedCucumber Over a year ago

@Oliver — This mention of text() did confuse me much. It is wrong. The . is simply the current element.

Oliver Over a year ago

@NicolasBarbulesco - Thanks for your comment and the link to the example. At the very end of the page they also write this: Whenever you need to select an element and use a predicate on that same element you will need to use a period "." to access that element's value. So yes, my mention of text() was not correct. As per w3.org: . selects the context node and text() selects all text node children of the context node. And even more examples using text().

Shawn Over a year ago

It doesn't seem to work when the target text has multiple lines.

Cros · Accepted Answer · 2008-08-27 14:05:40Z

The XPath for this is:

/books/book/authors/author[contains(., 'Ritchie')]

In C# the following code would return "Ritchie, Dennis M.":

xmlDoc.SelectSingleNode("/books/book/authors/author[contains(., 'Ritchie')]").InnerText;

dusan · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-20 14:24:13Z

4

//author[contains(text(), 'Ritchie')]

edited Jun 20, 2012 at 14:24

dusan

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answered Aug 27, 2008 at 13:03

Chris Marasti-Georg

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