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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T08:40:46+00:00

Let’s say I’m querying an xhtml document, and I want to query all of

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Let’s say I’m querying an xhtml document, and I want to query all of the siblings following a table with id='target'. Also, I neither want the first <table> sibling nor the first <ol> sibling of this particular element. Here’s the best I could come up with:

//table[@id='target']/following-sibling::*[not(self::table[1]) and not(self::ol[1])]

However, this isn’t returning any results when it should. Obviously I’m not understanding some of the syntax for this (I couldn’t find a good source of information). I would certainly appreciate it if someone more experienced with XPath syntax could give me a hand. Also, for purely academic purposes, I’d be curious what the above is actually doing.

UPDATE:
See LarsH’s answer for the explanation of why my XPath wasn’t working, and see Dimitre’s answer for the accepted solution.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Use:

     /table[@id='target']/following-sibling::*[not(self::table) and not(self::ol)] 
| 
 /table[@id='target']/following-sibling::table[position() > 1]
|
 /table[@id='target']/following-sibling::ol[position() > 1]

    This selects all the following siblings of the table that are not table and are not ol and all the following table siblings with position 2 or greater and all the following ol siblings with position 2 or greater.

    Which is exactly what you want: all following siblings with the exception of the first table following sibling and the first ol following siblings.

    This is pure XPath 1.0 and not using any XSLT functions.

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