Get a data from this XML doc using Xpath?

Question

I want to know the number of persons with "Lot" in their addres, from this XML doc using Xpath.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<personnes xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="personne.xsd">
    <personne id="n1" pays="MA">
        <nom>Ayoubi</nom>
        <prenom>Nezard</prenom>
        <dat_naiss>1999-02-05</dat_naiss>
        <telephone>+21266666666</telephone>
        <adress>
            Lotxxx Num: 38
            <ville>Rabat</ville>
        </adress>
    </personne>
    <personne id="n11" pays="Fr">
        <nom>Karimi</nom>
        <prenom>Hamdani</prenom>
        <dat_naiss>2000-05-07</dat_naiss>
        <telephone>+21266666666</telephone>
        <adress>
            rue xxx Num: 18
            <ville>Grenoble</ville>
        </adress>
    </personne>
</personnes>

I Tested my Xpaths here : here

I tried so many Xpaths but i don't know how to apply the count function on this Xpath : //adress/contains(text()[1],"Lot") that returns to me :

Boolean='true'

Boolean='false'

Answer 1

This XPath,

count(//personne[adress[contains(.,'Lot')]])

will count the number of personne elements with an adress child whose string-value contains a "Lot" substring. This will include "Lot" substrings wrapped within other markup.

This XPath,

count(//personne[adress/text()[contains(.,'Lot')]])

will do the same but exclude "Lot" substrings wrapped within other markup.

Both XPath expressions work with XPath 1.0 and up.

See also

• Testing text() nodes vs string values in XPath
• Why is XPath contains(text(),'substring') not working as expected?

Answer 2

In XPath-1.0, the expression would have to be

contains(//adress/text()[1],"Lot")

This would give you the result of true. To get the result of true and false, you would have to iterate over the //adress/text()[1],"Lot" nodes, preferably with an xsl:for-each.

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Following up, you can get the count of the personne elements that contain the string Lot in its adress child by using the following expression:

count(contains(//personne/adress/text()[1],"Lot"))

Its result should be 1.