I'm working on a small querying module (in js) for html and I want to provide a generic query(selector) function supporting both, css selectors and XPath selectors as string argument.
Regardless of how each kind of selection is done, my problem here is how to identify whether a given string is an xpath or a css selector. We can assume that the function would be something like this:
function query(selector){
selectorKind = identifySelectorKind(selector); // I want to know how to code this particular function
if(selectorKind==="css") return queryCss(selector);
if(selectorKind==="xPath") return queryXPath(selector); //Assume both functions exists and work
}
My first approach (given my limited knowledge of xPath queries) was to identify the query kind by checking if the first character is / (here I am assuming all relevant xPath queries begin with /)
So, identifySelectorKind would go a bit like this:
function identifySelectorKind(selector){
if (selector[0] === "/") return "xPath";
else return "css";
}
Note that I don't need to validate neither css nor xpath selectors, I only need an unambiguous way to differentiate them. Would this logic be enough? (in other words, all xPath selectors begin with / and no css selector begins the same way?), if not, is there a better way or some considerations I may want to know?
