XPath - Selecting elements that equal a value

Question

In Xpath  I am wanting to select elements that equal a specific value   Sample XML data    lt aaa id  11   gt       lt aaa id  21   gt           lt aaa id  31   gt  lt  aaa gt           lt bbb id  32   gt               lt aaa id  41   gt  lt  aaa gt               lt bbb id  42   gt  lt  bbb gt               lt ccc id  43   gt  lt  ccc gt               lt ddd id  44   gt qwerty lt  ddd gt               lt ddd id  45   gt  lt  ddd gt               lt ddd id  46   gt  lt  ddd gt           lt  bbb gt       lt  aaa gt       lt bbb id  22   gt            lt aaa id  33   gt qwerty lt  aaa gt            lt bbb id  34   gt  lt  bbb gt            lt ccc id  35   gt  lt  ccc gt            lt ddd id  36   gt  lt  ddd gt            lt ddd id  37   gt  lt  ddd gt            lt ddd id  38   gt  lt  ddd gt       lt  bbb gt       lt ccc id  23   gt qwerty lt  ccc gt       lt ccc id  24   gt  lt  ccc gt    lt  aaa gt    Now  using the XPath     ccc    qwerty     I get the correct  expected results   Name    Value ccc     qwerty   Now  using the XPath     aaa    qwerty     I get unexpected results   Name    Value aaa       aaa     qwerty   And what I am particularly interested  is how to select any element with that value  XPath          qwerty     I get very strange unexpected results   Name    Value aaa bbb ddd     qwerty bbb     qwerty aaa     qwerty ccc     qwerty   Can someone explain these results  and how to fix my XPath expressions to get more expected results

User · Accepted Answer

The XPath spec  defines the string value of an element as the concatenation  in document order  of all of its text-node descendents    This explains the  strange results     Better  results can be obtained using the expressions below       text      qwerty     The above selects every element in the document that has at least one text-node child with value  qwerty        text      qwerty  and not text   2      The above selects every element in the document that has only one text-node child and its value is   qwerty

User · Answer

Try      text    qwerty   because   is your current element

[xpath] XPath - Selecting elements that equal a value

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