Question

I am using http://xpath.online-toolz.com/tools/xpath-editor.php
as an online XPath evaluator. I tried a few others but it’s all the same

I have the following in my xml :-

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<test xmlns="abc">
</test>

Now the XPath queries

/
.

gives me the output :-

<test xmlns="abc">
</test>

However, the queries

test
/test
//test

Do not give me any output at all. I’m doing a very basic mistake but I can’t figure out what. I think it’s got something to do with namespaces but changing the queries to

abc:test

doesn’t help either because it gives an Invalid Expression error.

I’m using http://www.w3schools.com/xpath http://www.tizag.com/xmlTutorial/xpathtutorial.php &
http://oreilly.com/perl/excerpts/system-admin-with-perl/ten-minute-xpath-utorial.html

as my sources for XPath tutorials.

Answer 1

You have no explicit namespace prefixes in your target file, but you still need to cater for them. You can write

/*[local-name()='test' and namespace-uri()='abc']

Your “abc” is a namespaceURI, not a namespace prefix. It is probably invalid as most tools will test it for a URI form such as

http://www.abc.com/

A better file would be:

<test xmlns="http://www.abc.com">
</test>

when your query would be:

/*[local-name()='test' and namespace-uri()='http://www.abc.com/']

I have tested this on your site and it works.

The form

abc:test

will depend on a mechanism to set the prefix abc to 'http://www.abc.com/' and there doesn’t seem to be a mechanism on the site