Question

I want to determine if a node contains the string abc using following-sibling.

So far I’m looping through each item node and I want to determine if that item contains a node with the string abc

This is what i’ve tried so far:

contains(node/following-sibling::node[text()], 'abc')

XML:

<doc>
<item>
<node>1abc2</node>
<node>4</node>
<node>x</node>
</item>
<item>
<node>1</node>
<node>2abcX</node>
<node>x</node>
</item>
</doc>

Answer 1

If all you’re trying to do is “determine if that item contains a node with the string abc“ then you don’t need following-sibling. Use this to select all such nodes:

node[contains(., 'abc')]

This matches a node in both item elements provided.

If you want to check for a child node having a following sibling node with that text, then use:

node[following-sibling::node[contains(., 'abc')]]

This only matches the first node in the second item.

Either of these can be explicity converted to a boolean with the boolean function. For example:

boolean(node[following-sibling::node[contains(., 'abc')]])

This returns true if at least one node is selected by the expression (i.e. the node-set is non-empty).