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Asked: 2026-05-29T04:06:56+00:00

The question(s): Can a XPath 1.0 expression return only the names of xml nodes

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The question(s):
Can a XPath 1.0 expression return only the names of xml nodes (either qualified or not) and not the entire node? Is XPath 2.0 capable of same?

The detail:

I am profiling a series of well-formed xml documents for xml element node usage (ie. obtain aggregate counts of xml nodes across several xml documents). I have a perl script that retrieves a desired node-set of each document, then iterates over each node to obtain counts of the node names using the XML::XPath::Node::Element->getName. I have an alternate implementation that profiles xml node attributes and text values, but use an XPath statement to retrieve the “atomic values” (as opposed to using XML::XPath::Node::Element->getAttribute() or similar in perl).

[Note that I realize the “atomic values” are actually sets of attribute/ text nodes.]

I experience a 50-fold improvement in performance when allowing the XPath expression to return the desired “atomic values” as opposed to looping over results in perl, so I would like to retrieve xml node names in a manner similar to attribute (ie ‘attribute::‘ or ‘@‘)and text (ie ‘text()’) nodes. I’ve looked over the XPath and XML specs, but have not been able to identify a solution.

edit: To be more specific, I’m looking for something like 'local-name(//*)', but something that returns a set of names for all matching nodes (as opposed to only the first node found).

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    XPath 1.0 is a filter; it can’t generate content. If it’s not a node in the DOM (element node, attribute node, text node, etc), it can’t be returned. That means that strings can’t be returned by an XPath query.

    That’s why //*/local-name() can’t possibly work.

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