On May 4, 12:00 pm, Martin Honnen <mahotr...@yahoo.de> wrote:
> che10...@hotmail.com wrote:
> > Is there an xpath command to return just the value of an attribute and
> > not the enitre "attribute=value" string?
>
> > For example, on this data:
> > <people>
> >   <person id="1">
> >     <name>
> >       Pete Freitag
> >     </name>
> >   </person>
> >   <person id="2">
> >     <name>
> >       Dude
> >     </name>
> >   </person>

> > </people>
>
> > the xpath command: /people/person/@id
> > returns: id="1"
>
> > I only want the "1" , not the id= part.
>
> That XPath expresssion does not return a string at all, it returns a
> node set with one node in it. If you get
>    id="1"
> then you are somehow processing the node in the node set. You have not
> explained in any way how you are evaluating XPath expressions, if you
> are using MSXML and selectSingleNode then doing
>    xmlDoc.selectSingleNode("/people/person/@id").value
> should do to give you the attribute value.
>
> --
>
>         Martin Honnen --- MVP XML
>        http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

I'm using a C api library, I make a call like
"xpath_getValue( xpath_expression , returnStr );".
So i guess the api library is dealing with the node set and copying
it's 'version' of the results into my returnStr.

It returns the single value when I ask for things like:
 /people/person[id="1"]/name/text()

so I was hoping there was some built in xpath command that extracts
the value of an attribute.

I guess I'll have to look deeper into the api ti see what my options
are.

Thanks for the help Martin.

Chris