At 2008-09-05 14:33 +0200, Arndt Jonasson wrote:
I hope this is the right forum for this question. I asked it first
in the new group comp.text.xml, but was directed here. It has nothing
directly to do with XSLT, only with XPath.

XPath is in scope for this list.



Let's say we have a schema (maybe expressed in XML Schema, but not
necessarily so), that allows this instance document:

<top>
  <txt>This is text</txt>
  <books>
    <book>Tarzan</book>
    <book>Harry Potter</book>
  </books>
</top>

The text /top/txt may be empty, and the element /top/books may have no
children, so this instance document is also allowed:

<top>
  <txt/>
  <books/>
</top>

I now want to write an XPath expression that selects all nodes that do
not have child elements in the schema. It would always select /top/txt
and it would never select /top/books, even in the second example
above.

With XPath 1.0, this is not possible, since schema information is not
used there. But can it be done in XPath 2.0?

I think not in a generic fashion ... in XPath 2.0 you can test 
elements of particular named types (and the names of the types those 
types are based on) as not having any child elements, but you cannot 
test aspects of an element's type anonymously such as "any type that 
allows only element content".



Unless, perhaps, you had the flexibility in your schema to define a 
base type with your own name that is a very generic type that allows 
only element children of any name, and then specialize all of your 
element-content element types on that type restricting each one to 
the child elements for that particular type.  Then in your XPath you 
can test elements as being an element of your named generic type and 
it would be checking that the element is one that has element content.



I find the standard
document a bit forbidding, although I'm fairly well acquainted with
the 1.0 document.

We would like to add such capability to the XPath 1.0 implementation
in our application (which does have access to the schema), and if
XPath 2.0 offers a way to express it, it seems best not to reinvent
anything, hence this question.

Sharing your approach in the archive will probably be very 
interesting to readers of the list.



I hope this helps.



. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ken



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