Some XPath functions not available

ole_v2 · March 28th, 2007, 08:37 AM

Apologies if this is slightly OT...I guessed that XPath knowledge is mostly likely to be found in this forum.

I'm using XPath to locate elements in JavaScript (incidentally its a techinque I highly recommend, makes things much easier) I would like to match a div element that looks like any one of these:

Code:

<div class="modifiers toolbar">

Code:

<div class="toolbar modifiers">

Code:

<div class="modifiers toolbar ">

Code:

<div class="  toolbar  modifiers    ">

At the moment I'm just doing this:

Code:

.//div[contains(@class, "modifiers") and contains(@class, "toolbar")]

but obviously this is going to match...

Code:

<div class="footoolbar barmodifiers">

...too. I see from http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/xpath...ons.asp#string that I should be able to use translate() or match() functions but those don't seem to be available. Can anyone provide an explanation as to why that is / how I could achieve this? The JavaScript call (mostly) responsible for using XPath within JS is this:

Code:

document.createExpression()

Many thanks.

joefawcett · March 28th, 2007, 08:47 AM

translate and matches are XPath functions although the later is version 2.0 and no HTML XSLT engine supports version 2.0 as far as I know. Can you point to some documentation that explains document.createExpression() as I've not come across this?

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

ole_v2 · March 28th, 2007, 09:13 AM

Quote:

quote:Can you point to some documentation that explains document.createExpression() as I've not come across this

In short....no :( This http://jmvidal.cse.sc.edu/talks/java.../allslides.xml explains how to do it but not what its capable of.

...some time later..

I've done some hunting and this http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/NOTE-DOM-L...Path-20040226/ might be more what we're after. But there's no knowing how much this relates to the actual FireFox implementation. IE is, of course, another story. XPath in IE is achieved simply with this:

Code:

someDomContext.selectNode(xPathStr)

mhkay · March 28th, 2007, 02:22 PM

translate() should be available but it isn't very useful for what you want to do. Perhaps you meant tokenize(). tokenize() and matches() are XPath 2.0 functions and if they aren't available it means you are using one of the many XPath processors that don't yet support XPath 2.0.

I'd suggest using concat() to add a space at each end of the string and then using contains($x, ' modifiers ').

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

ole_v2 · March 29th, 2007, 05:25 AM

Yes sorry, I did mean tokenize(). Thanks for the suggestion I might do that.