How to get a list of String from Dom4j Node.selectObject or Node.selectNodes

Question

Hope you have a good day.

The Dom4j javadoc form Node.selectObject(String xpathExpression) says the following:

...The object returned can either be a List of one or more Node instances or a scalar object like a String or a Number instance depending on the XPath expression.

However when I try to get a list of String on this piece of xml:

<root>
...
    <level1>
        <property>pro1</property>
        <property>pro1</property>
        <property>pro1</property>
    <level1>
...
</root>

with the following code:

List result = document.selectObject("/root/level1/property/text()")

I get a list of org.dom4j.tree.DefaultText objet. Of course I can iterate on the list but I yould like to know if there is a way to get a list of String.

user357812 · Accepted Answer · 2011-01-07 18:44:13Z

0

From http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath/#section-Introduction

An expression is evaluated to yield an object, which has one of the following four basic types:

node-set (an unordered collection of nodes without duplicates)

boolean (true or false)

number (a floating-point number)

string (a sequence of UCS characters)

So, no sequence of xs:string in XPath 1.0

In XPath 2.0 there is a sequence data type, of course...

answered Jan 7, 2011 at 18:44

user357812

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2 Comments

Periworks Over a year ago

I'm using xpath 2.0. I don't understand your answer. Even if an expression is evaluated to yield and object of the described type, Dom4j Api should return a list of string isn't it.

user357812 Over a year ago

@Periworks: If you are selecting XML nodes the result should be a List of Node from dom4j.sourceforge.net/dom4j-1.4/apidocs/org/dom4j/… . Also do note that this method is deprecated in favor of evaluate and there is no indication that a dom4j interface can work with an XPath 2.0 engine

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