How to select a node's first child name? XPath

xpath children
Jaq picture Jaq · Aug 30, 2010 · Viewed 93k times · Source

I have an XML from which I have to select the name of the child of one of the nodes. I'm kind of a beginner in this, so I didn't find the Xpath expression to do it. I know the level of the node

Example

Name from /Employee/Department/

but Department has children nodes of unknown names. I have to select the first child of Department node. How can I do this?

Answer

user357812 picture user357812 · Aug 30, 2010

You wrote:

I have to select the first child of Department node

You could use:

/Employee/Department/*[1]

Then, you also wrote:

I have an XML from which I have to select the name of the child of one of the nodes

So, you could use:

name(/Employee/Department/*[1])

Related questions

XPath contains(text(),'some string') doesn't work when used with node with more than one Text subnode

I have a small problem with Xpath contains with dom4j ... Lets say my XML is <Home> <Addr> <Street>ABC</Street> <Number>5</Number> <Comment>BLAH BLAH …

Read More
How to use XPath contains() here?

I'm trying to learn XPath. I looked at the other contains() examples around here, but nothing that uses an AND operator. I can't get this to work: //ul[@class='featureList' and contains(li, 'Model')] On: ... <ul class="featureList"> &…

Read More
Select values from XML field in SQL Server 2008

Just looking at my XML field, my rows look like this: <person><firstName>Jon</firstName><lastName>Johnson</lastName></person> <person><firstName>Kathy</firstName&…

Read More