XPath How to select elements based on their value

Question

I am new to using XPath and this may be a basic question  Kindly bear with me and help me in resolving the issue  I have an XML file like this    lt RootNode gt     lt FirstChild gt       lt Element attribute1  abc  attribute2  xyz  gt Data lt  Element gt     lt FirstChild gt   lt  RootNode gt    I can validate the presence of an  lt Element gt  tag with     Element  attribute1  abc  and  attribute2  xyz    Now I also want to check the value of the tag for string  Data   For achieving this I was told to use     Element  attribute1  abc  and  attribute2  xyz  and Data   When I use the later expression I get the following error      Assertion failure message  No Nodes Matched   Element  attribute1  abc  and  attribute2  xyz  and Data    Kindly provide me with your advice whether the XPath expression I have used is valid  If not what will be the valid XPath expression

User · Accepted Answer

The condition below     Element  attribute1  abc  and  attribute2  xyz  and Data    checks for the existence of the element Data within Element and not for element value Data    Instead you can use    Element  attribute1  abc  and  attribute2  xyz  and text    Data

User · Answer

Element  attribute1  abc  and  attribute2  xyz  and    Data     The reason why I add this answer is that I want to explain the relationship of   and text      The first thing is when using     there are only two types of data     number  to select a node from node-set  bool  to filter a node-set from node-set   In this case  the value is evaluated to boolean by function boolean    and there is a rule      Filters are always evaluated with respect to a context    When you need to compare text   or   with a string  Data   it first uses string   function to transform those to string type  than gets a boolean result   There are two important rule about string      The string   function converts a node-set to a string by returning the string value of the first node in the node-set  which in some instances may yield unexpected results   text   is relative path that return a node-set contains all the text node of current node context node   like   Data     When it is evaluated by string   Data     it will return the first node of node-set  so you get  Data  only when there is only one text node in the node-set  If you want the string   function to concatenate all child text  you must then pass a single node instead of a node-set   For example  we get a node-set   a    b    you can pass there parent node to string parent   this will return  ab   and of cause string    in you case will return an concatenated string  Data     Both way will get same result only when there is a text node

[xpath] XPath: How to select elements based on their value?

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