Question

I need the equivalent of the following sql query:

selecting all films with a title starting with ‘V’ followed with 3 characters and then a space followed by a string (e.g Van Helsing)

SELECT * FROM films WHERE title LIKE ="V__ %";

How can i do this an xpath 1.0 expression in a tree like films/film/title, xpath 1.0 because i’ll use php with xslt.

Thank you

Answer 1

Is it ok, if string after space can not be presented? Then you can use:

//title[starts-with(text(), 'V') and string-length(substring-before(text(), ' '))=3]

If presence of string after space is important, then you can use:

//title[starts-with(text(), 'V') and string-length(substring-before(text(), ' '))=3 and string-length(substring-after(text(), ' '))>0]

From http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath/