Xpath newb question

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CHRISTOPHER FRAZIER - 22 Nov 2005 01:57 GMT

I'm trying to integrate an xml document into a vba application, and I'm pretty new to xml and xpath. I have the following xml document:

<Chart>
<Account>1000.10
<Department>10</Department>
<MapNo>111</MapNo>
<Amount>1234.59</Amount>
</Account>
....plus a bunch of similar <Account> elements
</Chart>

I can use //Account[Department='10'] to return all account nodes with a '10' department, but I can't use Chart[Account='1000.10'] to return a particular account. I figure I can restructure my xml document to be either

<Account Number="1000.10">

or

<Account>
<Number>1000.10</Number>
</Account>

But I don't understand why the first format didn't work. Can anyone explain this to me?

Thanks,

CHRISTOPHER FRAZIER

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Truong Hong Thi - 22 Nov 2005 04:33 GMT

Hi Christopher,

The thing that makes your xpath query does not work is the new line
character after 1000.10.
The best cure is using XPath "normalize-space" function, which trim
white spaces out of the string. Your query then would look like:
/Chart[normalize-space(Account)='1000.10']

Thi

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Truong Hong Thi - 22 Nov 2005 04:47 GMT

I am sorry. That only works if the element has no children, or contents
of children (Department, MapNo, Amount) are empty. When you specify:
[Account='1000.10'], it mean that the concatenation of the text of
"Account" and all of its children's text is '1000.10'.

In your case, to make it work, you should select the first text node
that is child of "Account", and compare it to '1000.10'. Something like
this:
/Chart[normalize-space(Account/text()[1])='10']

Regards,
Thi

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viditmittal@gmail.com - 25 Nov 2005 05:07 GMT

try the following XPath expression to get the result

.selectSingleNode("/Chart/Account[.='1000.10']")

i hope this helps

regards
VIDIT

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Xpath newb question

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