Question

I’m trying to figure out how to use XPath to get the exceptionID and instrumentID values out of the XML snippet in the following XML document (yes having XML in the CDATA is a little odd, but that’s what I get from the 3rd party service)

<?xml version="1.0"?>
  <exception>
    <info>
      <![CDATA[
        <info>
          <exceptionID>1</exceptionID>
          <instrumentID>1</instrumentID>
        </info>
      ]]>
    </info>
</exception>

Is it possible to get the values in one XPath statement?

I’m using javax.xml.xpath.XPath inside Java (JDK 1.5 with Xalan 2.7.1 and Xerces 2.9.1), e.g.

XPath xpath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();

Long exceptionId  = new Long(((Double)xpath.evaluate(this.exceptionIdXPath, 
                               document, XPathConstants.NUMBER)).longValue());

It’s the this.exceptionIdXPath variable that I’m not sure how to set, I know for example that:

/exception/info/text()/info/exceptionID won’t work (text() returns the data inside the CDATA but with no ‘knowledge’ that it is XML)

Answer 1

Yes, you can do it. But anything inside the CDATA section is a string and won’t be part of the DOM. Therefore, you have to use XPath’s string manipulation functions.

In XPath you can use substring-before and substring-after. Something like this may work:

substring-before(substring-after(/exception/info,"<exceptionID>"), "</exceptionID>")