Running XPath on child node.
- by Jeeyoung Kim
Hi.
I'm trying to do a xpath lookup on nodes returned by xpath lookup, but it doesn't seem to work as I expected.XPaths executed on the child nodes of a document seem to be executd against hthe root node of the document (in the example, the inventory tag.), instead of the root of the provided node.
Am I missing something here? I'm new to XPath.
Also, please don't answer "just do //book[author='Neal Stephenson'/title". I have a legitimate use case, and this is a simplified example.
Code snippet
DocumentBuilderFactory domFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
domFactory.setNamespaceAware(true);
DocumentBuilder builder = domFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
Document doc = builder.parse("src/main/java/books.xml");
XPathFactory factory = XPathFactory.newInstance();
XPath xpath = factory.newXPath();
Node book = (Node) xpath.evaluate("//book[author='Neal Stephenson']", doc, XPathConstants.NODE);
Node title = (Node) xpath.evaluate("/title", book, XPathConstants.NODE); // I get null here.
Node inventory = (Node) xpath.evaluate("/inventory", book, XPathConstants.NODE); // this returns a node.
book.xml
<inventory>
<book year="2000">
<title>Snow Crash</title>
<author>Neal Stephenson</author>
<publisher>Spectra</publisher>
<isbn>0553380958</isbn>
<price>14.95</price>
</book>
<book year="2005">
<title>Burning Tower</title>
<author>Larry Niven</author>
<author>Jerry Pournelle</author>
<publisher>Pocket</publisher>
<isbn>0743416910</isbn>
<price>5.99</price>
</book>
<book year="1995">
<title>Zodiac</title>
<author>Neal Stephenson</author>
<publisher>Spectra</publisher>
<isbn>0553573862</isbn>
<price>7.50</price>
</book>
<!-- more books... -->
</inventory>
