How to use not contains in xpath

Question

I have some XML that is structured like this    lt whatson gt     lt productions gt           lt production gt         lt category gt Film lt  category gt       lt  production gt       lt production gt         lt category gt Business lt  category gt       lt  production gt       lt production gt         lt category gt Business training lt  category gt       lt  production gt     lt  productions gt   lt  whatson gt    And I need to select every production with a category that doesn t contain  Business   so just the first production in this example    Is this possible with xpath  I tried working along these lines but got nowhere     production not contains category  business

User · Accepted Answer

XPath queries are case sensitive  Having looked at your example  which  by the way  is awesome  nobody seems to provide examples anymore    I can get the result you want just by changing  business   to  Business     production not contains category  Business       I have tested this by opening the XML file in Chrome  and using the Developer tools to execute that XPath queries  and it gave me just the Film category back

User · Answer

I need to select every production with a category that doesn t contain  Business    Although I upvoted  Arran s answer as correct  I would also add this    Strictly interpreted  the OP s specification would be implemented as    production category not contains     Business        rather than    production not contains category   Business       The latter selects every production whose first category child doesn t contain  Business   The two XPath expressions will behave differently when a production has no category children  or more than one   It doesn t make any difference in practice as long as every  lt production gt  has exactly one  lt category gt  child  as in your short example XML  Whether you can always count on that being true or not  depends on various factors  such as whether you have a schema that enforces that constraint  Personally  I would go for the more robust option  since it doesn t  cost  much    assuming your requirement as stated in the question is really correct  as opposed to e g   select every production that doesn t have a category that contains  Business

User · Answer

You can use not expression  function  not   is a function in xpath  as opposed to an operator   Example     a not contains  id   xx       OR  expression    true

User · Answer

Should be xpath with not contains   method    production not contains category  business

[xpath] How to use not contains() in xpath?

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