Question

Is there a way to apply XPath’s starts-with function to a node’s name instead of its value? I want to select the FOObar and FOObaz nodes from the following XML document without selecting the notFOO node:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<RootNode>
    <FOObar xmlns="http://sample.example.com">
        <value>numOne</value>
    </FOObar>
    <FOObaz xmlns="http://sample.example.com">
        <value>numTwo</value>
    </FOObaz>
    <notFOO xmlns="http://sample.example.com">
        <value>numThree</value>
    </notFOO>
</RootNode>

I get that it’s possible to use starts-with to search based on text nodes, e.g.

//sample:value[starts-with(.,'num')]

Is there a way to write the following that is syntactically valid?

//sample:[starts-with(node(),'FOO')]

This question originally came with an SSCCE, but now that the question is answered, all that code is just clutter. It’s still available in the revision history, of course.

Answer 1

Use the name() or local-name() functions to refer to nodes by name:

//*[starts-with(local-name(), 'FOO')]