How to parse XML in PL/SQL

Question

I have following xml struct in pl/sql:

<struct>
  <member>
    <name>CODE</name>
    <value>
      <integer>0</integer>
    </value>
  </member>
  <member>
    <name>MSG</name>
    <value>
      <string>Some message</string>
    </value>
  </member>
</struct>

How can i extract values in path /member/value/some_type using text in name tag? I mean something like this:

extract('//member/value/*[filter name tag = CODE]').getStringValue

Answer 1

You can achieve this using local-name()

XPath should be,

//member/value/*[local-name()='CODE']

Example:

1. //member/value/*[local-name()='integer']
2. //member/value/*[local-name()='string']

Result:

1. 0
2. Some message

UPDATE:

In this case, you XPath should be

//member[*='CODE']/*/*
//member[*='MSG']/*/*

Result:

1. 0
2. Some message

Answer 2

The short answer is you don't treat databases as ETL (extract,transform,load) tools. What you want to do is pass this XML file to a separate program that uses XPath and process it that way. Databases are only supposed to store data. In fact I have spent the past 5 months removing "exotic " code like this that made an Oracle database take 72+ hours to insert 400k rows. So again offset this to xpath

The query will look almost identical to your command above