Question

I wrote a Xpath query to look for an element with a nodeValue that contains a string.

/campaigns/campaign[contains("7218322441485795", creative_id)] 

However, the XML I’m querying has multiple <creative_id> elements;

<campaigns>
    <campaign>
        <creative_id>41485795</creative_id>
        <creative_id>41485759</creative_id>
        <creative_id>41485694</creative_id>
        <resources>
        ....

The problem is that the query only evaluates the first creative_id element and not second & third.

How do I write the XPath query to not be limited to the first creative_id element?

Answer 1

The XPath contains function returns true when the string value of the second argument is found in the first argument. Your ordering seems suspicious. You’re currently looking for the string value of creative_id in the given string, not the value of that string in creative_id.

Assuming that the argument ordering is correct, the following expression returns a campaign element if any of its creative_id children match a portion of the provided string:

/campaigns/campaign[creative_id[contains("7218322441485795", .)]]