Get Attribute from Xpath

Question

I need a method that can give me back the value of a specified attribute inside a specified xpath. So for example if we have xpath = /root/foo/body/part[5]/test[3] and we want the value of the attribute id inside the test[3] tag of the xpath then I need to be able to call a method that looks something like this:

public String getAttributeValue(String xpath, String attribute) {
     String attributeValue = "xpath/attribute".value();
     return attributeValue;
}

Answer 1

You can try with the @ command

//xpath[@attribute]

Note that you can also filter with the @

//xpath[@attribute='filtervalue']

Answer 2

Figured it out...

public String retrieveAttributeValue(Document document, String xpath, String attribute) throws IOException, ParserConfigurationException, SAXException, XPathExpressionException {
    XPath xPath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
    XPathExpression xPathExpression = xPath.compile(xpath + "/" + attribute);
    String attributeValue = "" + xPathExpression.evaluate(document, XPathConstants.STRING);
    return attributeValue;
}