Question

Please consider this sample file: http://www.w3schools.com/dom/books.xml

This XPath expression //title/text(), returns:

Everyday Italian
Harry Potter
XQuery Kick Start
Learning XML

Now I want just the first names, and try: tokenize(//title/text(),' ')[1], which returns:

Too many items

OTOH tokenize((//title/text())[1],' ')[1] returns first name for first node.

How can I get substrings with XPath while iterating nodes?

Answer 1

Try this

1. To get all parts except last one use this:

//title/string-join(tokenize(.,'\s+')[position() ne last()],' ')

or

2. To get only first one use this:

//title/string-join(tokenize(.,'\s+')[position() eq 1],' ')

Hope this helps.