Re: XPath: how to select based on element type?

[Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org>]

On Mon, 8 Jan 2001, Sankaranarayanan K V wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 08, 2001 at 10:33:26AM +0000, Matt Sergeant wrote:
> > On Mon, 8 Jan 2001, Sankaranarayanan K V wrote:
> > > (1) Is there a way a in XPath to select nodes based on their element type?
> >
> > Element type is not a term I recognise. Perhaps you either mean node type
> > or element name. Either way:
>
> By "element type," I meant the value of the 'type' attribute in the
> element declaration (in the schema) for the element. That type which is
> declared using the xsd:simpleType or xsd:complexType elements in the
> schema definition.
>
> I didn't mean the node type or element name.
>
> To give an example:
>
> I want to pick up all elements of type 'Address' from the following
> document:
>
>   <Person>
>     <Name>...</Name>
>     <WorkAddress>...</WorkAddress>
>     <HomeAddress>...</HomeAddress>
>   </Person>
>
> where WorkAddress and HomeAddress may be of type Address in the schema
> definition.

XPath has no understanding of XML Schemas. Sorry, but you are out of luck
on this one.

You *could* potentially do something with document(), loading in the
schema and reading the "type" from that and comparing it with name(), but
its certainly not a standard operation.

Also note that document() isn't a core XPath function, but a function
added to XPath by XSLT, so it might not be available depending on your
XPath implementation - a moot point if you're talking about using XPath
from within XSLT.

-- 
<Matt/>

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