Select specific String using Xpath and XSLT

Question

I want to select String between < and >.

Input :

<p type="Endnote Text">&lt;p:endnote_bl1&gt;This is a bullet list in an endnote</p>
<p type="Endnote Text">&lt;p:endnote_bl2&gt;This is a bullet list in an endnote</p>
<p type="Endnote Text">&lt;p:endnote_bl3&gt;This is a bullet list in an endnote</p>

I want to select p:endnote_bl1,p:endnote_bl2, etc.. from the text. It means whatever text between < and >. How can I write the XPath for this.

Your starting tag is <p> but your closing tag is </tps:p>. — Jack Fleeting
– Jack Fleeting, Commented Jul 29, 2019 at 11:19

Tim C · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-29 12:13:38Z

1

In XSLT, using xpath, you can simply select all p elements (or tps:p elements, if you do have namespaces), and use substring-before and substring-after to extract the text, although do note this assumes one occurrence of each of < and >

<xsl:for-each select="//p[@type='Endnote Text']">
  <xsl:value-of select="substring-before(substring-after(., '&lt;'), '&gt;')" />
  <xsl:text>&#10;</xsl:text>
</xsl:for-each>

See it in action at http://xsltfiddle.liberty-development.net/bnnZX7

If you could use XSLT 2.0, you could do it without the xsl:for-each...

<xsl:value-of select="//p[@type='Endnote Text']/substring-before(substring-after(., '&lt;'), '&gt;')" separator="&#10;" />

Or you could also use replace in XSLT 2.0....

<xsl:value-of select="//p[@type='Endnote Text']/replace(., '&lt;(.+)&gt;.*', '$1')" separator="&#10;" />

answered Jul 29, 2019 at 12:13

Tim C

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Jack Fleeting · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-29 12:20:47Z

0

You could use just xpath, if we fix your xml like so:

<doc>
  <p type="Endnote Text">&lt;p:endnote_bl1&gt;This is a bullet list in an endnote</p>
  <p type="Endnote Text">&lt;p:endnote_bl2&gt;This is a bullet list in an endnote</p>
  <p type="Endnote Text">&lt;p:endnote_bl3&gt;This is a bullet list in an endnote</p>
</doc>

Then this expression,

doc/p/substring(./text(),2,13)

will select

p:endnote_bl1
p:endnote_bl2
p:endnote_bl3

answered Jul 29, 2019 at 12:20

Jack Fleeting

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