Question

I’m trying to use XPath to find all elements that have an element in a given namespace.

For example, in the following document I want to find the foo:bar and doodah elements:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> <root xmlns:foo='http://foo.example.com'>   <foo:bar quux='value'>Content</foo:bar>   <widget>Content</widget>   <doodah foo:quux='value'>Content</doodah> </root> 

I know I can use the following XPath expression to load all attributes from a given namespace:

'//@*[namespace-uri()='http://foo.example.com']' 

However:

• This doesn’t give me the elements, just the attributes.
• Where elements contain multiple attributes from that namespace, this selector will return a result per-attribute rather than per-element

Is it possible to get what I want, or do I have to gather the attributes and calculate the unique set of elements they correspond to?

Answer 1

Use:

//*[namespace-uri()='yourNamespaceURI-here'    or     @*[namespace-uri()='yourNamespaceURI-here']    ] 

the predicate two conditions are or-ed with the XPath or operator.

The XPath expression thus selects any element that either:

• belongs to the specified namespace.
• has attributes that belong to the specified namespace.