Searching HTML with XQuery and returning the parent node

Question

I've inherited an XQuery app running in eXist-db and I've been able to learn enough XQuery to tidy it up a bit, but I'm struggling with the final change I need to do.

The app has an HTML file stored in a collection in the following format:

<html>
    <head>...</head>
    <body>
        <div class="part">
            <div class="chapter">
                <div class="section">
                    <p>Text 1</p>
                    <p>Text 2</p>
                    <p>Text 3</p>
                </div>
                <div class="section">
                    <p>Text 4</p>
                    <p>Text 5</p>
                    <p>Text 6</p>
                </div>
            </div>
        </div>
        ...
        <div class="part">
            <div class="chapter">
                <div class="section">
                    <p>Text 1</p>
                    <p>Text 2</p>
                    <p>Text 3</p>
                </div>
                <div class="section">
                    <p>Text 1</p>
                    <p>Text 2</p>
                    <p>Text 3</p>
                </div>
            </div>
        </div>
        ...
    </body>
</html>

The <body> has multiple "part"s, with each "part" having multiple "chapter"s which themselves can have multiple "section"s etc.

I'm trying to do a search feature, and I've got the following code which works, but not as I need it to:

declare function app:search-result($node as node(), $model as map(*), $q as xs:string) {
    let $content := doc("/db/apps/EI/resources/publications/EI.html"))
    for $hit in $content//p[ft:query(., concat("'", $q, "'"))] 
        order by ft:score($hit) descending
        return
            $hit
};

At the moment the function only returns the pure text within the <p> it was found, but what I need is to find out every part, chapter and section DIVs it was found in

e.g., if I search for "text 1" I need to know it was found in:

1st part, 1st chapter, 1st section

2nd part, 1st chapter, 1st section

2nd part, 1st chapter, 2nd section

etc

This is where I'm stumped. Any ideas?

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:58

Use the parent or ancestor axes to "climb down the tree" again. If you're at a text node, and want the parent node (containing the text node), use $hit/parent::*. If you want to find the matching chapter, go for $hit/ancestor::div[@class="chapter"] (and similarly for the other elements).

For the case that you have nested chapters, add the positional predicate [1] to find the most specific ancestor.

Be aware that the class attribute might contain multiple classes, and needs special handling when matching it!

Searching HTML with XQuery and returning the parent node

1 Answers1