I'm posting this to both the XSL and C# newsgroups because it spans both.

I have an XPath passed to me that starts at the root node and goes down to a 
table row node. From this XPath I was grabbing the table node by appending a 
"/.." to the end of the XPath.

While this technique works great when the row exists, if the row does not 
exist, I can no longer identify the table node.

In code, one might say, well just rip off everything past the last slash 
character. This won't work because I cannot guarantee that a filter is not 
being used. And there might be nested filters and "[" and "]" characters 
used in the filter as values.

So what I need to find is a way to extrapolate the parent XPath from that 
which is passed in, but accounting for potential nested filters and [ ] 
characters used as filter values.

Anyone got any ideas? Here's a sample test XPath:

/ns:Root/ns:Branch[ns:Val1 = '[']/ns:Table[ns:Row/ns:Field1 = 
'[']/ns:Row[ns:Field2 = '[Test' and ns:Group1/ns:Field3[ns:Val2 = ']'] = 
'[']

What I need to get from it is the following:

/ns:Root/ns:Branch[ns:Val1 = '[']/ns:Table[ns:Row/ns:Field1 = '[']

I also cannot count on a namespace existing on the nodes. It might not.

Regex would be great (if even possible). Brute force works too.

Thanks ahead of time for any help.

-- 
Greg Collins
Microsoft MVP
Visit Braintrove at http://www.braintrove.com