Question

I have some XML and an XPath query. I’m using Yahoo! widgets, so I’m using XPath 1.0.

Here’s the gist of my XML…

<root>     <cat num='SOURCE'>         <movie>             <swf>speak.swf</swf>              <width>250</width>              <height>150</height>              <colour>cccccc</colour>          </movie>         <movie>             <swf>inertia.swf</swf>              <width>380</width>              <height>130</height>              <colour>9a9a9a</colour>          </movie>         <movie>             <swf>swing.swf</swf>              <width>380</width>              <height>130</height>              <colour>9A9A9A</colour>          </movie>         .... 

Now… if I run this query:

'root/cat/movie/swf' 

I get 42 results, all ‘swf’ nodes which is correct.

If however, I just want the 6th one, I’d like to be able to do:

'root/cat/movie/swf[6]' 

But I get a list containing 0 nodes.

Weirdly, using [1] (And no other value) yields my list of all 42 nodes.

Clearly I’m missing something quite fundamental here. Anyone see what it is?

Answer 1

I wonder if you mean:

'root/cat/movie[6]/swf' 

(gets the swf of the 6th movie)

or alternatively:

'(root/cat/movie/swf)[6]' 

(finds all the movie/swf elements, and selects the 6th)

When each movie has exactly one swf, the two are the same; if a movie has zero or multiple swf elements, they the two queries are subtly different…