XPath Tutorial - How to select elements in XPATH based on attribute and element value example

XPath (XML Path Language) is a powerful query language used to navigate and select elements in XML or HTML documents. It provides a way to locate elements based on various criteria, such as attributes and element values. Here's an example of how to select elements using XPath based on attribute and element value:

Consider the following XML document:

xml

Copy code

<root>

  <book id="1">

    <title>Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone</title>

    <author>J.K. Rowling</author>

  </book>

  <book id="2">

    <title>The Great Gatsby</title>

    <author>F. Scott Fitzgerald</author>

  </book>

  <book id="3">

    <title>To Kill a Mockingbird</title>

    <author>Harper Lee</author>

  </book>

</root>

Selecting elements based on attribute value:

To select the <book> element with the attribute id equal to "2", you can use the following XPath expression:

xpath

//book[@id='2']

This expression uses the // to search for all <book> elements in the document and specifies the condition [@id='2'] to select only those elements with the attribute id equal to "2".

Selecting elements based on element value:

To select the <book> element(s) where the <title> element has the value "To Kill a Mockingbird", you can use the following XPath expression:

xpath

//book[title='To Kill a Mockingbird']

This expression searches for all <book> elements in the document and selects only those elements where the <title> child element has the value "To Kill a Mockingbird".

Combining attribute and element value conditions:

You can also combine attribute and element value conditions to make more specific selections. For example, to select the <book> element with the attribute id equal to "1" and the <title> element value equal to "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", you can use the following XPath expression:

xpath

//book[@id='1' and title='Harry Potter and the Philosopher\'s Stone']

Note that when the attribute value or element value contains a single quote, like in the title above, it needs to be escaped using a backslash (\').

These examples demonstrate how to select elements in XPath based on attribute and element value. XPath provides many more capabilities and syntax options for querying XML and HTML documents.