How can I select an element with multiple classes with Xpath?

Question

In the above xml sample I would like to select all the books that belong to class foo and not in class bar by using xpath.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<bookstore>
  <book class="foo">
    <title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
    <author>J K. Rowling</author>
    <year>2005</year>
    <price>29.99</price>
  </book>
  <book class="foo bar">
    <title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
    <author>J K. Rowling</author>
    <year>2005</year>
    <price>29.99</price>
  </book>
  <book class="foo bar">
    <title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
    <author>J K. Rowling</author>
    <year>2005</year>
    <price>29.99</price>
  </book>
</bookstore>

Good question, +1. See my answer for two different XPath 2.0 solutions of which the first might be the most efficient of them all especially with a non-optimizing XPath 2.0 engine. — Dimitre Novatchev
– Dimitre Novatchev, Commented Apr 17, 2011 at 1:11

Shimmy Weitzhandler · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-28 17:04:02Z

39

By padding the @class value with leading and trailing spaces, you can test for the presence of " foo " and " bar " and not worry about whether it was first, middle, or last, and any false positive hits on "food" or "barren" @class values:

/bookstore/book[contains(concat(' ',@class,' '),' foo ')
        and not(contains(concat(' ',@class,' '),' bar '))]

edited Feb 28, 2015 at 17:04

Shimmy Weitzhandler

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answered Apr 14, 2011 at 11:22

Mads Hansen

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2 Comments

Steven Pribilinskiy Over a year ago

What if @class contains tab or even new-line character instead of space. Here comes handy the normalize-space function (XPath 1.0) that strips the leading and trailing white-space from a string, replaces sequences of whitespace characters by a single space, e.g. concat(' ',normalize-space(@class),' ')

Mads Hansen Over a year ago

@Steven Pribilinskiy - That should not be necessary. Due to how attribute values are normalized by the XML parser, tabs and carriage returns will have already been normalized into a space. w3.org/TR/xml/#AVNormalize

Benjamin Loison · Accepted Answer · 2025-10-17 13:07:29Z

11

Although I like Mads solution: Here is another approach for XPath 2.0:

/bookstore/book[
                 tokenize(@class," ")="foo" 
                 and not(tokenize(@class," ")="bar")
               ]

Please note that the following expressions are both true:

("foo","bar")="foo" -> true
("foo","bar")="bar" -> true

edited Oct 17 at 13:07

Benjamin Loison

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answered Apr 14, 2011 at 11:55

Dennis Münkle

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1 Comment

Mads Hansen Over a year ago

+1 for the XPath 2.0 solution. So many things are easier with 2.0.

Dimitre Novatchev · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-17 01:09:19Z

4

XPath 2.0:

/*/*[for $s in concat(' ',@class,' ') 
            return 
               matches($s, ' foo ') 
             and 
              not(matches($s, ' bar '))
      ]

Here no tokenization is done and $s is calculated only once.

Or even:

/*/book[@class
          [every $t in tokenize(.,' ') satisfies $t ne 'bar']
          [some  $t in tokenize(.,' ') satisfies $t eq 'foo']
       ]

edited Apr 17, 2011 at 1:09

answered Apr 17, 2011 at 0:40

Dimitre Novatchev

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