如何使用SelectNode（）WITHOUT属性检索XML节点列表？

Question

I'm trying to parse out a simple list of strings from an XML file. I only want to retrieve the values that do NOT have a specified attribute.

For example, in this XML snippet:

<meaning>sultry</meaning>
<meaning>hot</meaning>
<meaning>summer heat</meaning>
<meaning m_lang="fr">chaud</meaning>
<meaning m_lang="fr">torride</meaning>
...

Calling SelectNodes("//meaning") will return sultry, hot, summer heat, chaud, torride. However, I only want to retrieve the values labeled only <meaning> , not <meaning m_lang="fr> , ie I only want to have sultry, hot, summer heat.

Is there a simple method to only retrieve the non-attribute values? They will always be the first in the list, but there may be a single value, or multiple.

Answer 1

Yes, you'll need to make your XPath Expression (the string you're passing to SelectNodes()) more specific. In this case, you want to find nodes without any additional attributes, so you modify your XPath expression like so:

SelectNodes("//meaning[not(@*)]")

To break the above down:

• "meaning" selects all "meaning" elements,

• "@*" selects all elements with at least one attribute,

• "not" negates a rule

So together this means "Select all 'meaning' elements that do not have at least one attribute" .

For further reference, check out this nifty xpath cheatsheet .