I am parsing some XML something like this:
<root> <some_gunk/> <dupe_node> ... stuff I want ... </dupe_node> <bits_and_pieces/> <other_gunk/> <dupe_node> ... stuff I don't want ... </dupe_node> <more_gunk/> </root> An XPath of '//dupe_node' will give me two instances of dupe_node to play with. I only want to traverse the first. Can I do this with XPath?
/descendant::dupe_node[1] //dupe_node[1] is generally wrong, although it produces an identical result in this particular case. See docs:
The location path //para[1] does not mean the same as the location path /descendant::para[1]. The latter selects the first descendant para element; the former selects all descendant para elements that are the first para children of their parents.
Given the following XML:
<foo> <bar/> <foo> <bar/> </foo> </foo> //bar[1] will produce two nodes, because both bars are first children of their respective parents.
/descendant::bar[1] will give only one node, which is the first of all the bars in the document.
//dupe_node[1] XPath counts from 1, not 0 in this case. You can use this tool to try things out in your browser:
//dupe_node[1]
