Finding elements without specific descendants

[mwebb415]

I'm trying to take a large XML file and identify a subset of nodes.
The XML has a structure similar to:

<root>
<home>
<test>junk</test>
</home>
<home>
<xxx>Hi There!</xxx>
<aaa>No value add</aaa>
<test>More testing</test>
<bbb>More nothing</bbb>
</home>
.
.
.
.
.
</root>

What I'd like to do is find <home> nodes that do not have the <aaa>,
<xxx> or <bbb> child elements. The source file has approximately 500
nodes in total, and I expect that the number of those that are missing
all three of the child elements to be in the single digits, but I have
to account for them. I'm generating a large XPath query and parsing
the file on the fly via PHP.

Any thoughts? Is this possible?

Thank you!

 

[Joseph Kesselman]

What I'd like to do is find <home> nodes that do not have the <aaa>,
<xxx> or <bbb> child elements.

/root/home[not(aaa) and not(bbb) and not(xxx)]

http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#predicates
http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#booleans

 

[mwebb415]

What I'd like to do is find <home> nodes that do not have the <aaa>,
<xxx> or <bbb> child elements.

/root/home[not(aaa) and not(bbb) and not(xxx)]

http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#predicateshttp://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#booleans

Thanks - that did it! Thought I was missing something very obvious.
Much appreciated!