XPath for selecting the text of an attribute

[pjvleeuwen]

Hi all,

For many of you this may be childishly simple, but the following
problem keeps me wondering for almost two hours, so I hope any of you
could point out what it is that I am doing wrong.

Consider the following simple XML: <?xml version="1.0"?

<rootE><tagA>valueA</tagA><tagB attrB1="attrValueB1"

<tagCCB>60</tagCCB><tagCCC/></tagCC><tagCD/><tagCE/></tagC></rootE>

Now I want to read the value "attrValueB2" so I tried writing a
regular expression for it. I know that the following selects the
attribute (nicely highlighted by the Liquid XML Studio): /rootE/tagB/
@attrB2
But I cant seem to select the value of this attribute. I get an empty
string when quering /rootE/tagB/@attrB2/text()

ANY suggestions? I cant see what I'm doing wrong. Everything seems to
be fine in comparison with the tutorials I have seen and I tried all
the lexical variations / alterations I could think of.

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Cheers,
Paul

 

[Martin Honnen]

Now I want to read the value "attrValueB2" so I tried writing a
regular expression for it. I know that the following selects the
attribute (nicely highlighted by the Liquid XML Studio): /rootE/tagB/
@attrB2
But I cant seem to select the value of this attribute. I get an empty
string when quering /rootE/tagB/@attrB2/text()

Attributes in the XPath data model don't have any text child nodes.
Simply use
/rootE/tagB/@attrB2
to select the attribute, then you would get the value in a way depending
on the host language e.g. in XSLT with
<xsl:value-of select="/rootE/tagB/@attrB2"/>

 

[Bjoern Hoehrmann]

* (e-mail address removed) wrote in comp.text.xml:

Now I want to read the value "attrValueB2" so I tried writing a
regular expression for it. I know that the following selects the
attribute (nicely highlighted by the Liquid XML Studio): /rootE/tagB/
@attrB2
But I cant seem to select the value of this attribute. I get an empty
string when quering /rootE/tagB/@attrB2/text()

Use "string(/rootE/tagB/@attrB2)" though string() will be used
implicitly in many cases and is consequently rarely necessary.

 

[pjvleeuwen]

You where both right. Thank you very much. This clarifies a lot.
Cheers,
Paul