On 2009-06-06, Martin Honnen <mahotrash@y...> wrote:
> Mario Splivalo wrote:
>
>> <itemList>
>>   <item fieldName="name">Mario</item>
>>   <item fieldName="age">29</item>
>>   <item fieldName="height"></item>
>> </itemList>
>> 
>> What I'm trying to get is a rowset or table, since I'm doing this from
>> postgres. So, my table would look like this:
>> 
>> fieldName      fieldValue
>> name           Mario
>> age            29
>> height         NULL
>> 
>> The idea was to have two XPath queries on the original XML. First one
>> ('/itemList/item/@fieldName') would extract all the attributes, and second
>> one would extract all the 'values' ('/itemList/item/text()'). Now I guess
>> I'll have to extract the nodes, as you've suggested, and then for each node
>> chech if it's empty or not.
>
> Are you using XPath inside of XSLT? There is no need to use foo/text() 
> to get the string value of a 'foo' element, an element does have a 
> string value of its own for instance with XSLT
>    <xsl:value-of select="foo"/>
> would suffice. If you are using an XPath API then check how it allows 
> you to extract the string value of a node.

Nope, I'm using it inside postgresql. Postgresql has rudimentary XML support
(http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/functions-xml.html#FUNCTIONS-XML-PROCESSING)
there is a XPath function which returns onedimensional array of type xml[]
(xml type, in postgres, is varchar/text with added support for xml
validation). Function accept xpath query and xml document, I'm clueless how
to extract string value of a node. It's based on libxml2, so it should be
able to do so, but, I guess i'm stuck:

postgres=# select xpath('/a/b', '<a><b>1</b><b></b></a>');
      xpath      
-----------------
 {<b>1</b>,<b/>}
(1 row)

So, I have an array where each element is XML document. I could run an xpath
query ('/b') on each of those elements and like that find out which ones are
empty.

	Mike
-- 
"I can do it quick. I can do it cheap. I can do it well. Pick any two."

Mario Splivalo
majk@f...