Find string from xpath which contains tag as child elements In Java

Question

I have following part of XML code and I want to get string from specific tag.

Input XML:

<subject>
   <title> this title has 5 <sup>+</sup> rating star </title>
</subject>

From the above XML I want a string using xpath like

Expected output:

"this title has 5+ rating star"

Note: I have used @XmlPath like

@XmlPath('subject/title/text()')
private String title;

But it returns second value as result in title variable like "rating star"

Answer 1

This is precisely why people advise against using text() unless you have very specialized requirements. The XPath function string() applied to a node returns the string value of the node, which for an element is the concatenation of all the contained text, ignoring markup - which is exactly what you are looking for. So you want string(subject/title) . If you're using a Java API note that the result will now be a string, not a node-set.

Answer 2

Perhaps you could try string(subject/title) . I don't have access to Java for the time being but the string operation is common enough in XPath. It is supposed to concatenate text content without traces of any elements.