C# and XPath with wildcard attribute name and specific attribute value

Question

Can I use XPath to find all elements that have an attribute whose name begins with a certain set of characters and the value of the attribute contains a certain value? For example:

<items>
     <item id="item1" attr-name0="UPC" attr-value0="12345" attr-name1="Price" attr-value1="10.00" attr-name2="Enabled" attr-value2="true"/>
     <item id="item2" attr-name0="Price" attr-value0="25.00" attr-name1="Enabled" attr-value1="false"/>
     <item id="item3" attr-name0="Price" attr-value0="10.00" attr-name1="UPC" attr-value1="54321" attr2-name="UPC" attr-value2="abcde"/>
</items>

Ultimately I need to find the id and UPCs for the items that have one or more UPCs specified. There are a maximum of 11 attributes (attr-name0 to attr-name10). I can use C# and XML(XPath)/LINQ to accomplish this. Thank you!

har07 har07 · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-08T13:27:17

The following XPath should return <item> elements where one of attribute that starts with 'attr-name' has value of 'UPC' :

//item[@*[starts-with(name(), 'attr-name') and .='UPC']]

The equivalent LINQ-to-XML would look about like this (assume doc is an instance of XDocument or XElement) :

doc.Descendants("item")
   .Where(i => i.Attributes()
                .Any(a => a.Name.ToString().StartsWith("attr-name") && a.Value == "UPC")
    );

Given the XML in question, 'item1' and 'item3' elements should be returned by the XPath and the LINQ above.

C# and XPath with wildcard attribute name and specific attribute value

1 Answers