Re: xpath constructor

[Jeff Greif]

This is a better solution not depending on anything but pure DOM, and
possibly with better performance.  It could be improved if there is some
kind of publicly accessible table of intern'ed strings in the DOM
implementation.

    public static String getPathFromRoot(Element e) {
        Node p = e.getParentNode();
        StringBuffer path = new StringBuffer();
        try {
            if (p.getNodeType() == Node.ELEMENT_NODE ) {
                path.append(getPathFromRoot((Element)p));
            }
            path.append("/");
            String prefix = e.getPrefix();
            String local = e.getLocalName();
            String namespaceUri = e.getNamespaceURI();
            path.append(prefix != null ? prefix : "");
            path.append(":");
            path.append(local);
            int siblings = 0;
            for (Node s=e.getPreviousSibling(); s != null;
                 s=s.getPreviousSibling()) {
                if (s.getNodeType()== Node.ELEMENT_NODE
                    && s.getLocalName().equals(local)
                    && s.getNamespaceURI().equals(namespaceUri)) {
                    ++siblings;
                }
            }
            path.append("[");
            path.append(1 + siblings);
            path.append("]");
            return path.toString();

        } catch (Exception ex) {
            ex.printStackTrace(System.err);
            System.exit(-63);
        }
        return "";
    }