I am new to XPath and I want to differentiate between these 2 XPath.
1) /*/*:Employee/*:Firstname/*:Name[contains(.,abc)]
2) /*/*:Employee/*:Firstname/*:Name[abc]
I have tried to google it but I am not getting a clear idea.
Could you please explain this difference in a simple way?
contains is a string function, that checks if the first string contains the second string (or if you like, if the second string is a substring of the first). Where an argument to a string function is a node (like Name) it will get the string value of that node to use. It is not used to check if a node contains a specific child node.
So, Name[contains(.,abc)] is saying "Does the string value of the Name element contain the string value of the child abc element?"
This is an odd thing to do, because it will always be true for all Name elements. The string value of a node includes the text of all descendants. And if there was no child abc, the string value would be an empty string, and so the expression would still be true.
For example, if the node was <Name>1<abc>2</abc></Name> the string value of Name would be "12", which obviously contains the string value of abc, which is "2".
On the other hand Name[abc] is getting the Name element if a child abc exists, regardless of what the string value is. Thus it would match <Name><abc /></Name> but not <Name/>.
(It's possible, the first expression should be Name[contains(.,'abc')], in which case it would match Name elements which contained the string "abc". Thus it would match <Name>abcdef</Name> but not <Name>cdefgh</Name>)
