It seems with all the rich amount of function in xpath that you could do an "if" . However , my engine keeps insisting "there is no such function" , and I hardly find any documentation on the web (I found some dubious sources , but the syntax they had didn't work)
I need to remove ':' from the end of a string (if exist), so I wanted to do this:
if (fn:ends-with(//div [@id='head']/text(),': '))
then (fn:substring-before(//div [@id='head']/text(),': ') )
else (//div [@id='head']/text())
Any advice?
This question is related to
xpath
if-statement
Yes, there is a way to do it in XPath 1.0:
concat( substring($s1, 1, number($condition) * string-length($s1)), substring($s2, 1, number(not($condition)) * string-length($s2)) )
This relies on the concatenation of two mutually exclusive strings, the first one being empty if the condition is false (0 * string-length(...)), the second one being empty if the condition is true. This is called "Becker's method", attributed to Oliver Becker.
In your case:
concat(
substring(
substring-before(//div[@id='head']/text(), ': '),
1,
number(
ends-with(//div[@id='head']/text(), ': ')
)
* string-length(substring-before(//div [@id='head']/text(), ': '))
),
substring(
//div[@id='head']/text(),
1,
number(not(
ends-with(//div[@id='head']/text(), ': ')
))
* string-length(//div[@id='head']/text())
)
)
Though I would try to get rid of all the "//" before.
Also, there is the possibility that //div[@id='head'] returns more than one node.
Just be aware of that — using //div[@id='head'][1] is more defensive.