[xml] Getting attribute using XPath

Given an XML structure like so:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

<bookstore>

<book>
  <title lang="eng">Harry Potter</title>
  <price>29.99</price>
</book>

<book>
  <title lang="eng">Learning XML</title>
  <price>39.95</price>
</book>

</bookstore>

How could I get the value of lang (where lang is eng in book title), for the first element?

The standard formula to extract the values of attribute using XPath is

elementXPath/@attributeName

So here is the xpath to fetch the lang value of first attribute-

//title[text()='Harry Potter']/@lang

PS: indexes are never suggested to use in XPath as they can change if one more title tag comes in.

you can use:

(//@lang)[1]

these means you get all attributes nodes with name equal to "lang" and get the first one.

You can also get it by

string(//bookstore/book[1]/title/@lang)    
string(//bookstore/book[2]/title/@lang)

although if you are using XMLDOM with JavaScript you can code something like

var n1 = uXmlDoc.selectSingleNode("//bookstore/book[1]/title/@lang");

and n1.text will give you the value "eng"

If you are using PostgreSQL, this is the right way to get it. This is just an assumption where as you have a book table TITLE and PRICE column with populated data. Here's the query

SELECT xpath('/bookstore/book/title/@lang', xmlforest(book.title AS title, book.price AS price), ARRAY[ARRAY[]::TEXT[]]) FROM book LIMIT 1;

Thanks! This solved a similar problem I had with a data attribute inside a Div.

<div id="prop_sample" data-want="data I want">data I do not want</div>

Use this xpath: //*[@id="prop_sample"]/@data-want

Hope this helps someone else!

You can try below xPath pattern,

  XPathExpression expr = xPath.compile("/bookstore/book/title[@lang='eng']")

Here is the snippet of getting the attribute value of "lang" with XPath and VTD-XML.

import com.ximpleware.*;
public class getAttrVal {
    public static void main(String s[]) throws VTDException{
        VTDGen vg = new VTDGen();
        if (!vg.parseFile("input.xml", false)){
            return ;
        }
        VTDNav vn = vg.getNav();
        AutoPilot ap = new AutoPilot(vn);
        ap.selectXPath("/bookstore/book/title/@lang");
        System.out.println(" lang's value is ===>"+ap.evalXPathToString());
    }
}