Does Chrome use XPath 2.0?

Question

I was under impression that all latest browsers are with XPath 2 now. When I use lower-case() and uppser-case() (functions introduced in version 2) Chrome throws a syntax error. However, their older alternative translate() works fine.

Is this a bug or does the latest Chrome actually use XPath 1? Is there a command / way to find out the XPath version?

// Finds the element as expected.
$x('//h2/text()[. = "Delete"]') 

// Doesn't find the element (also expected).
$x('//h2/text()[. = "delete"]') 

// SyntaxError: Failed to execute 'evaluate' on 'Document': The string '//h2/text()[lower-case(.) = "delete"]' is not a valid XPath expression.
$x('//h2/text()[lower-case(.) = "delete"]')

possible duplicate of [What browsers support Xpath 2.0?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16658799/what-browsers-support-xpath-2-0) — Richard, Aug 22 '14 at 20:54
I saw 16658799. Did you read the answer carefully? Do it first then. And then read mine again… — Ian Bytchek, Aug 22 '14 at 20:58
None of the "big" browsers use XPath 2. There's your answer. Simple. — Arran, Aug 22 '14 at 21:41

kjhughes · Accepted Answer · 2017-01-31T14:18:27.207

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No, Chrome uses XPath 1.0.

You can simplify your XPath expression to just a v2.0 function to see this:

$x("lower-case('ABC')")
SyntaxError: Failed to execute 'evaluate' on 'Document': The string 'lower-case('ABC')' is not a valid XPath expression.

Trying any other XPath 2.0 function such as current-date() will yield a similar error.

There is no built-in way of definitively determining the version of an XPath implementation other than by such probes.

XSLT, on the other hand, has system-property('xsl:version') for determining version 1.0 versus 2.0.

edited Jan 31 '17 at 14:18

answered Aug 22 '14 at 21:11

kjhughes

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Is this still the case? – Dark Star1 Jan 31 '17 at 13:49
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The answer shows you how you can check, but, yes, it's still the case in 2017 with Chrome v55: Only XPath 1.0 is supported, not XPath 2.0. – kjhughes Jan 31 '17 at 14:15
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Still the case in Nov 2018 – Betlista Nov 01 '18 at 21:16
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Still the case in Aug 2019 with Chrome 76 – ShockwaveNN Aug 23 '19 at 11:01
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Hello from May 2020, Covid-19 lockdown! Still no support in Chrome 81. – Eric May 13 '20 at 10:00
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This sucks. Why is this still not supported? I'll have to write ugly xpath code just to do simple case sensitive searches. Edit: Apparently, this is never going to be supported https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/903#issuecomment-707748069 – andromeda May 27 '21 at 09:34
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Greetings from October, 2021: Still no support in Chrome 94. – Dave Land Oct 21 '21 at 03:17
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its dec 2022. still no support in chrome Version 108 – rakesh kashyap Dec 04 '22 at 18:44

score 12 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 22 '14 at 21:17

12

Google Chrome (or Chromium) still uses libxml2 thus is limited to XPath 1.0. Cf. this Readme from the source.

answered Aug 22 '14 at 21:17

Hille

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Here's a still-live link from StackOverflow about [libxml2 not implementing XPath 2.0](https://stackoverflow.com/a/26164535/290085). – kjhughes Nov 22 '18 at 15:15

Does Chrome use XPath 2.0?

2 Answers2

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