XPath expression to return an attribute's value

["Rachel D. Basse" <honestrosewater@care2.com>]

Greetings. :^)

This question came up while using XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0. I'd like to root out any related, more general misunderstandings if possible.

Given

 <Root Attribute="Value"/>

I want to make an XPath path expression evaluate to the string "Value". So I want the XDM typed-value of the Attribute attribute, yes? Does XPath have a way to refer to the typed-valued of an attribute?

My first instinct was to refer to the child text node of Attribute, using "Attribute/text()", but that won't work since attributes have no children.

As I understand things, adding any predicate to an "Attribute" path expression won't work since the expression would still return an attribute node or nothing, and I want a string, neither an attribute node nor nothing.

I can apparently get what I want by casting the attribute node as a string, but I am wondering if there is another, more direct way.

Thanks for reading,
Rachel Basse

P.S. I am aware that I can also use xsl:value-of, but I specifically want an XPath expression to evaluate to an attribute's value.


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