Resolving an Xpath query

Question

Hi I have a doubt related to XPath.

My xml file looks as follows.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<name xmlns="http://localhost/book" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://localhost/book books.xsd">
Java and XML
</name>

here is the xpath query and its result

/* - returns element "name"

/*/text() - returns text "Java and XML"

/name - no result

/name/text() - no result

Why specifying name is not giving any result?

It is possible because that the name node missed the namespace. How do you use the XPath query, in XSL file or application? Can you provide more information? — Edward Zhu

Kirill Polishchuk Kirill Polishchuk · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-21T07:44:48

That is because element name is declared in http://localhost/book. Therefore in XPath query you should specify it. As a rule you should pass to your XML engine namespace and it prefix, then query your XML using full-qualified name, i.e.:

/ns:name/text()

However you can use other technique specifying namespace in query, i.e.:

/*[local-name() = 'name' and namespace-uri() = 'http://localhost/book']

Resolving an Xpath query

2 Answers