Question

I’m searching for an XPath string (for VBA Excel) that can look for all nodes on a specific level and that are only returned in case they have a specific (grand) child node. Regardless how ‘deep’ this is nested. Relationale: I don’t know how deep a specific child is nested therefore I can’t make a fixed path.

In case of the example below. I’m searching for all nodes that are directly under the root ” and which have any child that contain the name ‘Test’

XML STRING:

<Program>
   <AA name="1"/>
   <BB name="2">
      <CC name="Test"/>
   </BB>
   <DD name="Test"/>
   <EE name="3">
      <FF name="4">
         <GG name="Test"/>
      </FF>
   </EE>
</Program> 

REQUIRED SELECTION:

Item(0) = <BB name="2">
Item(1) = <DD name="Test">
Item(2) = <EE name="3">

The following XPath expression gives the nodes under Program

xmlDoc.selectNodes("/Program/*")

The following XPath expression gives the nodes which contain the name Test

xmlDoc.selectNodes("//*[@name="Test"]")

What I need is not a ‘union’ of the 2 paths but a ‘overlap’. Does anybody know how to make this?

Answer 1

The following XPath expression selects what you need:

/Program/*[.//@name='Test']

It fetches all immediate children of Program and then selects the ones that have a name attribute value of 'Test' or contain descendants that do.

A more verbose and perhaps more readable version of this expression would be:

 /Program/*[descendant-or-self::*/attribute::name='Test']

So your VBA code can look like this:

mlDoc.selectNodes("/Program/*[descendant-or-self::*/attribute::name='Test']")