XPath expression to get only the value of all the attributes

Question

XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<bookstore>
    <book category="cooking">
        <title lang="en">Everyday Italian</title>
        <author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
        <year>2005</year>
        <price>30.00</price>
        <location>DL</location>
    </book>
    <book category="children">
        <title lang="es">Harry Potter</title>
        <author>J K. Rowling</author>
        <year>2005</year>
        <price>29.99</price>
        <location>UP</location>
    </book>
    <book category="web">
        <title lang="en">XQuery Kick Start</title>
        <author>James McGovern</author>
        <author>Per Bothner</author>
        <author>Kurt Cagle</author>
        <author>James Linn</author>
        <author>Vaidyanathan Nagarajan</author>
        <year>2003</year>
        <price>49.99</price>
        <location>  DL</location>
    </book>
    <book category="web">
        <title lang="en">Learning XML</title>
        <author>Erik T. Ray</author>
        <year>2003</year>
        <price>39.95</price>
        <location>dl </location>
    </book>
    <category>web</category>
</bookstore>

XPath expression:

string(/bookstore/book/@category)

The above XPath expression is returning only the value of the first attribute under book element:

cooking

Expected output:

cooking

children

web

I want my XPath expression to return the string value of all the attributes of book element. I referred several posts but I couldn't find onw in which I could get all the attribute values.

Apparently you are using an XSLT 1.0 processor, despite your xpath-2.0 tag. In XPath 2.0, your expression would produce an error because the string() function takes only a single item as its argument. — michael.hor257k
Is there a way I can display all the values from the attributes and achieve the expected output? Because sometimes there is a scenario where we have to compare the attributes one by one with some other value which is also dynamic. — Deepak Jain
Comparing and displaying are two very different things. In XSLT 2.0, <xsl:value-of select="/bookstore/book/@category"/> will display "cooking children web web". In XSLT 1.0, you can select all categories using the same expression and use this selection for comparison - but xsl:value-of (and other expressions, such as string()) will return only the first one of these. -- Please edit your question to clarify what exactly you want to do, incl. the expected output. — michael.hor257k

Martin Honnen Martin Honnen · Accepted Answer · 2020-04-01T11:41:00

0

votes

In XPath 2 and later you can use /bookstore/book/@category/string().

XPath expression to get only the value of all the attributes

1 Answers