XPath to exclude child elements.

WilliamYou · December 18th, 2012, 12:11 PM

Hello,

Given an XML file of :

Code:

Level_1
	Level_2
		Level_3

Is there any XPath can I use to return ONLY the Level_2 element (and attributes) with NO Level_3 elements? I'm thinking not, but thought I would ask just in case.

As using

Code:

/Level_1/Level_2 
/Level_1/Level_2[@*]
/Level_1/child::Level_2

all return the child elements.

In case you are wondering why I want this there can be many 1000s of Level_3 elements and for the purpose of this transformation are redundant, so didn't really want them returned.

--
William

mhkay · December 18th, 2012, 12:53 PM

Actually the query /level1/level2 returns a node-set containing a single node, the level2 element. Your problem is that the application processing the result of the XPath expression will typically process the subtree under the returned node, and this subtree of course includes the level3 element. So you need to return a modified copy of the level2 node in which the level3 element has been removed. XPath cannot transform the XML, so this is beyond the capabilities of XPath: you need XSLT or XQuery.

WilliamYou · December 18th, 2012, 12:58 PM

As always; Thank you, I was beginning to think it was me!

--
William