How to select a node's first child name? XPath

51
votes

I have an XML from which I have to select the name of the child of one of the nodes. I'm kind of a beginner in this, so I didn't find the Xpath expression to do it. I know the level of the node

Example

Name from /Employee/Department/

but Department has children nodes of unknown names. I have to select the first child of Department node. How can I do this?

3
xpathchildren
Could someone add the 'child' tag? I had trouble finding this question and it helped me a lot. Adding it requires 1500 repuation hence I can't do it. – Happy Bird

3 Answers

70
votes

You wrote:

I have to select the first child of Department node

You could use:

/Employee/Department/*[1]

Then, you also wrote:

I have an XML from which I have to select the name of the child of one of the nodes

So, you could use:

name(/Employee/Department/*[1])
23
votes

I don't know the exact context of your XML, but I believe this is the XPath you are looking for...

/Employee/Department/*[1]

The key part of this XPath is *[1], which will select the node value of the first child of Department.

If you need the name of the node, then you will want to use this...

name(/Employee/Department/*[1])
10
votes

You need something like:

local-name(/Employee/Department/*[1])