Question

I am fairly new to XML dev.. I had a few questions regarding XML parsing with XPATH and libxml.

I have an XML structured as :

<resultset>
        <result count=1>
           <row>
               <name> He-Man! </name> 
               <home> Greyskull </home>
           <row>
        </result>
        <result count=2>
           <row>
               <name> Spider-Man</name> 
               <home> Some downtown apartment </home>
           <row>
           <row>
               <name> Disco-Man!</name> 
               <home> The 70's dance floor </home>
           <row>
        </result>
<resultset>

I need to pick out the names from this XML , but where the count is 2 , i need it only from the first record. I ran through a few tutorials, but i am unable to come up with an XPATH query which would serve this purpose.

/name will select all name elements.

/result[@count > 1 ]/row[1]/name | /result[@count =1 ]/row/name

Is this possible to be done with XPATH ? Is this better to be done via XPATH or by walking the XML tree?

Can some one point me to some complex searches through out XML’s ?

Edit : The actual scenario requires select a subset of the XML row , which are nested at 2 levels at times. This sounds like i need to OR ‘|’ many paths to select the nodes i require… I am not sure if that would be efficient as opposed to walking a tree… The above is typed to replicate the problem 🙂

Thanks!

Answer 1

Try this XPath –

/resultset/result[@count=2]/row/name

This will give a list of all nodes falling under this XPath. From this just take the first element (as you needed only the first record).