How do you select child-or-self (children + self)

Question

In XSL 1.0, descendant-or-self will select ALL descendants and the current node. What if you want to select only the immediate children and the current node (i.e. child-or-self)?

Is that possible with XPATH?

score 12 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 08 '21 at 05:46

12

In XPath 1.0 or later use:

SomeExpression | SomeExpresion/node()

In XPath 2.0 or later use:

SomeExpression/(self::node()|node())

An incorrect answer would be:

SomeExpression | SomeExpression/*

because this selects only those children of SomeExpression that are elements, while SomeExpression may have other children too -- as text-nodes, comment nodes, processing-instruction nodes.

Also incorrect is:

./SomeExpression | ./*/SomeExpression

This doesn't select the immediate children of ./SomeExpression and it doesn't select the immidiate children of ./*/SomeExpression.

edited Dec 08 '21 at 05:46

MichaelChirico

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answered Nov 30 '10 at 13:37

Dimitre Novatchev

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Note for those using standard JS, no major browsers support XPath 2.0 – ThatsJustCheesy Dec 13 '21 at 14:48
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@ThatsJustCheesy In a browser one can use Saxon.js, which implements even XPath 3.1 – Dimitre Novatchev Dec 13 '21 at 16:43

How do you select child-or-self (children + self)

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