Escaping characters in xpath

Stark

Hi all,

Anyone know how to do an xpath query for a node that contains a character like "["? Trying to execute a query like /node[2] and it's giving out once it reaches the "[" character.

Cheers.

xonet

Without an example of your XML document and the full XPATH string, it is difficult to see where your problem is.

alanmc

Stark wrote: »

Hi all,

Anyone know how to do an xpath query for a node that contains a character like "["? Trying to execute a query like /node[2] and it's giving out once it reaches the "[" character.

Cheers.

Because [] is an operator in XPath (much the same way it indexes into an array in Java, it is used to index into a NodeSet in XPath), you are very much discouraged from using either '' in your node names.

I've just done a small test in XMLSpy and it told me that '[' was an illegal character. It can be used in attribute values or in CDATA, but it has special meaning in XML so should not be used when defining your node names.

Same goes for the likes of : and .

Al.

Civilian_Target

[ = [
] = ]

Civilian_Target

Goddam, it interpreted the codes as chars

[ = [
] = ]