Get attribute of parent using xpath query

Question

I have an XML file that is like this:

<PurchaseOrders>
    <PurchaseOrder PoNum="5000" OrderDate="2006-02-18" Status="Unshipped">
        <item>
            <partid>100-100-01</partid>
            <name>Snow Shovel, Basic 22 inch</name>
            <quantity>3</quantity>
            <price>9.99</price>
        </item>
    </PurchaseOrder>
<PurchaseOrders>
... some more Purchase Orders

And I would like to return the PurchaseOrder's PoNum which contains an item with partid = "100-100-01". So far I have an XPath query that looks like:

/PurchaseOrders/PurchaseOrder[item/partid="100-100-01"]

But this only returns the PurchaseOrder. How can I get the PoNum attribute of this? That is, I want to obtain the value of PoNum, which in this case is "5000".

Justin Ko · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-15 20:47:58Z

1

Use:

/PurchaseOrders/PurchaseOrder[item/partid="100-100-01"]/@PoNum

The @PoNum returns the attribute. Basically, use @ to select attributes.

answered Nov 15, 2013 at 20:47

Justin Ko

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3 Comments

yiwei Over a year ago

So I'm using this XML Developer extension with Eclipse and it keeps telling me that this command returns an empty sequence...

dcsohl Over a year ago

It works for me, using the same Eclipse extension and your sample document above (correcting the closing tag to </PurchaseOrders>). Can you elucidate? Show sample XML and XPath which don't work?

Justin Ko Over a year ago

@YiweiGao, is PurchaseOrders actually the root node of the xml document? The question suggests that there may actually be multiple PurchaseOrders - ie there are multiple roots or there is a different root node. You could try starting the xpath with // instead of /.

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