Could you please help me to find all the elements b which have the child element c in the example below?
<a>
<b name = "b1"></b>
<b name = "b2"><c/></b>
<b name = "b3"></b>
</a>
The xpath query must return the b2 element
The second question is I want to combine 2 conditions: I want to get the element which have name = "b2" and has the element c But this syntax seems not to work: //b[@name='b2' and c]
Whenever the structure of the XML document is known, it is better to avoid using the // XPath pseudo-operator, as its use can result in big inefficiency (traversal of the whole document tree).
Therefore, I recomment this XPath expression for the provided XML document:
/*/b[c]
This selects any b element that is a child of the top element of the XML document and that has a child-element named c.
UPDATE: The OP asked a second question just minutes ago:
The second question is I want to combine 2 conditions: I want to get the element which have name = "b2" and has the element c But this syntax seems not to work:
//b[@name='b2' and c]
The provided XPath expression does select exactly the wanted element.
Here is XSLT - based verification:
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>
<xsl:template match="/*">
<xsl:copy-of select="//b[@name='b2' and c]"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
When this transformation is applied on the provided XML document:
<a>
<b name = "b1"></b>
<b name = "b2"><c/></b>
<b name = "b3"></b>
</a>
the XPath expression is evaluated and the correctly-selected element is copied to the output:
<b name="b2">
<c/>
</b>
//b[@name='b2' and c]selects the second child ofa-- exactly as it should. – Dimitre Novatchev