Getting attribute using XPath

Question

Given an XML structure like so    lt  xml version  1 0  encoding  ISO-8859-1   gt    lt bookstore gt    lt book gt     lt title lang  eng  gt Harry Potter lt  title gt     lt price gt 29 99 lt  price gt   lt  book gt    lt book gt     lt title lang  eng  gt Learning XML lt  title gt     lt price gt 39 95 lt  price gt   lt  book gt    lt  bookstore gt    How could I get the value of lang  where lang is eng in book title   for the first element

User · Answer

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.

User · Answer

You can try below xPath pattern      XPathExpression expr   xPath compile   bookstore book title  lang  eng

User · Answer

you can use       lang  1    these means you get all attributes nodes with name equal to  lang  and get the first one

User · Answer

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     gt   ap evalXPathToString

User · Answer

Thanks   This solved a similar problem I had with a data attribute inside a Div      lt div id  prop sample  data-want  data I want  gt data I do not want lt  div gt    Use this xpath       id  prop sample    data-want  Hope this helps someone else

User · Answer

How could I get the value of lang  where lang eng in book title   for   the first element    Use      book 1  title  lang   This means   Select the lang attribute of the title element that is a child of the first book child of the top element of the XML document   To get just the string value of this attribute use the standard XPath function string     string    book 1  title  lang

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

[xml] Getting attribute using XPath

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