Using .Net XPath with source text containing '

Question

I have some XPath code that's working great 99% of the time. But now I have an XML document that contains unescaped characters in it. In this case the string I'm looking for is something like "Maury's bad string".

So how do I construct an XPath query to find this string? I tried escaping:

../a:Data[a:Name='" & NewT.Name.Replace("'", "&apos;") & "'"

But that fails to match the text. So then I tried:

../a:Data[a:Name='" & NewT.Name.Replace("'", "''") & "'"

But that tells me there's an invalid token in the search string.

Anyone know the trick here?

Maybe [how to escape single quote in xslt substring function](https://stackoverflow.com/a/12406745/205233) helps. — Filburt, Nov 06 '18 at 20:25
It appears in my case "if you want the string delimiter in a string literal, you're hosed" — Maury Markowitz, Nov 06 '18 at 20:55

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 06 '18 at 21:07

0

This is NOT a complete solution, as it only works if the strings contain single or double quotes, but not both:

Dim S As String
If Name.Contains("'") Then
    S = ../a:Data[a:Name=""" & Name & """
Else
    S = ../a:Data[a:Name='" & Name & "'"
End If

answered Nov 06 '18 at 21:07

Maury Markowitz

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Using .Net XPath with source text containing '

1 Answers1