SelectNodes and GetElementsByTagName

html xml dom selectnodes getelementsbytagname
Jason picture Jason · Mar 25, 2010 · Viewed 7.9k times · Source

what are main differences between SelectNodes and GetElementsByTagName.

Answer

bobince picture bobince · Mar 25, 2010

SelectNodes is a .NET/MSXML-specific method that gets a list of matching nodes for an XPath expression. XPaths can select elements by tag name but can also do lots of other, more complicated selection rules.

getElementByTagName is a DOM Level 1 Core standard method available in many languages (but spelled with a capital G in .NET). It selects elements only by tag name; you can't ask it to select elements with a certain attribute, or elements with tag name a inside other elements with tag name b or anything clever like that. It's older, simpler, and in some environments faster.

Related questions

How To Auto-Format / Indent XML/HTML in Notepad++

Is there a way to re-indent a block of code? I'm looking for something similar to Ctrl+Shift+F in Eclipse (Auto-Format/Indent). To be clear, I already know how to format XML outside of Notepad++ (Eclipse works fine, as …

Read More
How do I escape ampersands in XML so they are rendered as entities in HTML?

I have some XML text that I wish to render in an HTML page. This text contains an ampersand, which I want to render in its entity representation: &. How do I escape this ampersand in the source XML? …

Read More
How can I find an element by CSS class with XPath?

In my webpage, there's a div with a class named Test. How can I find it with XPath?

Read More