Question

Im trying to select nodes that contain a given string in one of its attributes, but it seems that I can only do it on a certain attribute.

var tempUsers = xmlDocument.selectNodes("//Users/*[contains(@Id,'TEXT')]");

I guess that instead of @Id I can write something else to check all the attributes of a node and not only the Id.

thanks.

Answer 1

You can use @* in xpath to select all attributes, but the naive

//Users/*[contains(@*,'TEXT')]

will not do what you expect. The contains function expects its arguments to be strings, so if you give it a node set instead it will first convert the node set to a string (by taking the string value of the first node in the set) and then use that value in the function. Instead you need to say

//Users/*[@*[contains(.,'TEXT')]]

which will find all Users elements in the document and then select all their child elements that have any attribute whose value contains the substring TEXT.