Dear All,
Can you tell what the XPath expression that:
"selects all C elements that come after A and have a D parent" is.
That is, there might be a schema, which declares the unwanted instances of C
as integers, while
the other C declared has some anonymous complexType.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<A>
<B>
<C/> <!-- DO NOT select
this -->
<D>
<!-- recursion is introduced here -->
<C> <!-- select this -->
<B>
<C/> <!-- DO NOT select
this -->
<D>
<C/> <!-- select this -->
</D>
</B>
</C>
</D>
</B>
</A>
/A//D/C (/A/descendant::D/C) would suffice, or, better, /A//B/D/C
(/A/descendant::B/D/C). But this would not rule out the possibility of the
B/D/C pattern appearing somewhere after A in another context. I cannot find
any XPath feature that would handle recursion.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<A>
<B>
<F>
<B>
<D>
<C/> <!-- this would be
selected incorrectly -->
</D>
</B>
</F>
<D>
<!-- recursion is introduced here -->
<C> <!-- select this -->
<B>
<C/> <!-- DO NOT select
this -->
<D>
<C/> <!-- select this -->
</D>
</B>
</C>
</D>
</B>
</A>
Using /A/B/D/C | /A/B/D/C//B/D/C would overcome this, but you can see how I
could create another problematic example...
How does one find one's way around this, using a generic XPath approach?
I am not saying this is good XML design. To the contrary! ... it is legal,
nonetheless ...any ideas?
regards,
nikolas/
