Can I use a Regex in an XPath expression?

Question

Something like .//div[@id='foo\d+] to capture div tags with id='foo123'.

I'm using .NET, if that matters.

Answer 1

As other answers have noted, XPath 1.0 does not support regular expressions.

Nonetheless, you have the following options:

• Use an XPath 1.0 expression (note the starts-with() and translate() functions) like this:

.//div
   [starts-with(@id, 'foo') 
  and 
   'foo' = translate(@id, '0123456789', '')
  and
   string-length(@id) > 3   
   ]

• Use EXSLT.NET -- there is a way to use its functions directly in XPath expressions without having to use XSLT. The EXSLT extension functions that allow RegEx-es to be used are: regexp:match(), regexp:replace() and regexp:test()

• Use XPath 2.0/XSLT 2.0 and its inbuilt support for regular expressions (the functions matches(), replace() and tokenize())