XPath help. Pretty basic

spectre

I want to select the first product in the following XML with name 'bread'

At first I was thinking that this would work:

/SHOP/BASKET/PRODUCT[NAME='bread'][1]

However, this selects the first bread product for each basket

I only want to select the first bread product that appears in the document. I can return this by using:

/SHOP/BASKET[PRODUCT/NAME='bread'][1]/PRODUCT[NAME='bread'][1]

Fair enough but I imagine there is a more succinct solution. Much obliged if anyone can help.

Cheers

EDIT: This also works, though I believe the above method is more efficient:

/SHOP/descendant::PRODUCT[NAME='bread'][1]

Anyone know a more efficent method?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<SHOP>
	<BASKET colour="black">
		<PRODUCT>
			<NAME>beans</NAME>
			<VAL>BAKED</VAL>
		</PRODUCT>
	</BASKET>
	<BASKET colour="green">
		<PRODUCT>
			<NAME>bread</NAME>
			<VAL>BROWN</VAL>
		</PRODUCT>
		<PRODUCT>
			<NAME>bread</NAME>
			<VAL>WHITE</VAL>
		</PRODUCT>
	</BASKET>
	<BASKET colour="blue">
		<PRODUCT>
			<NAME>pasta</NAME>
			<VAL>MAC</VAL>
		</PRODUCT>
		<PRODUCT>
			<NAME>bread</NAME>
			<VAL>TOASTED</VAL>
		</PRODUCT>
	</BASKET>
</SHOP>

onemorechance

You have a different xpath parser than me I think, but in your solution:

/SHOP/BASKET[PRODUCT/NAME='bread'][1]/PRODUCT[NAME='bread'][1]

does it work without repeating the predicate?

/SHOP/BASKET[PRODUCT/NAME='bread'][1]/PRODUCT

spectre

onemorechance wrote: »

does it work without repeating the predicate?

/SHOP/BASKET[PRODUCT/NAME='bread'][1]/PRODUCT

No, this will retrieve every product in the correct basket. We want to retrieve only the bread product.

I'm pretty sure that XPath results will be independent of the parser used. I'm developing my app in XMLSpy using the default integrated parser fwiw

xonet

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" >

  <xsl:output method="xml" />

  <xsl:template match="/">
     <xsl:value-of select="//PRODUCT[NAME='bread'][1]" />
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

spectre

Thanks xonet, this does indeed yield the correct answer.

Despite the fact that we are passing two nodes to the xsl:value-of command, it seems to only process the first. My existing code uses this facility in several places but I'm not totally happy with it.

Surely it is considered bad practice to pass an XPath expression which yields a multi node set? This is the reason I was looking for an efficent XPath expression which would yield only the desired first node.