XPath wildcards on node name

46
votes

I want to grab a node from my XML file, the node has a prefix such as "latest_", but this may change and I'm keen for my XSLT to be as fluid as possible. Here's the XPath I want to use:

/data/stats/*_cost

This should match latest_cost, newest_cost, anything_cost, is there a way of doing this?

Cheers :-)

4
xmlxsltxpath
Depends on if XPath 2.0 is available in your environment. XPath 1.0 doesn't allow this and 2.0 does. - Younes
As for expressions like *_cost neither XPath 1.0 nor XPath 2.0 allows them. - Alex Nikolaenkov

4 Answers

70
votes

This is the correct XPath 1.0 expression which selects an element with the last 5 character of name equal to "_cost" in any namespace.

/data/stats/*[substring(name(), string-length(name()) - 4) = '_cost']
8
votes

You could also use contains

e.g 

/data/stats[contains(.,'_cost')]
8
votes

With XPath 1.0 you can use /data/stats/*[substring-after(name(), '_cost') = ''] pattern. That checks if the element's name ends with the _cost suffix.

In XPath 2.0 there is fn:ends-with(str, str) and your corresponding expression will be *[ends-with(name(), '_cost')].

7
votes

The above did not work for me. I had to "slightly" modify that as follows:

/data/stats/*[contains(name(),'_cost')]