Question

I am trying to extract a value from an xml element, located in an XMLTYPE column in an Oracle Table. The xml element which I am trying to extract have a parent for which a namespace is defined.
The xml looks something like:

<a>
  <b xmlns="urn:www.someSite.com/myModel">
    <c>my value</c>
  </b>
</a>

If I want to extract the content of the “a” element, its context is correctly returned:

SELECT Extract(myColumn, '/a') FROM myTable;

But for returning the content of the “c” element I didn’t succeed to find any version to work. The following instructions does not work:

SELECT Extract(myColumn, '/a/b/c') FROM myTable;

SELECT Extract(myColumn, '/a/b/c', 'xmlns="urn:www.someSite.com/myModel"') FROM myTable;

SELECT Extract(myColumn, '/a/b/c', 'urn:www.someSite.com/myModel') FROM myTable;

Can anybody help me, with the extract statement that would work in this case?

Answer 1

Since the a element does not have the namespace, you can first extract its child elements without using namespaces in the function, and then extract the value from the b with the namespace:
Try:

select extract(extract(myColumn, 'a/*'),
               'b/c/text()',
               'xmlns=urn:www.someSite.com/myModel') 
  from myTable