Retrieve specific preceding sibling nodes attributes
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by Matthieu BROUILLARD
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Published on 2010-05-26T22:15:52Z
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2010/05/26
22:31 UTC
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Is there an XPath way of recovering directly one specific attribute of preceding sibling nodes of an XML node using an XPath query?
In the following example, I would like to retrieve the values of the alt
attribute of each img
nodes that precede the div
element marked with the id=marker
.
<content>
<img alt="1" src="file.gif" />
<img alt="2" src="file.gif" />
<img alt="3" src="file.gif" />
<img alt="4" src="file.gif" />
<div id='marker'></div>
</content>
For this example, I want to retrieve the values 1 2 3 4
.
I use the following XPath query
//div[@id='marker']/preceding-sibling::img
in order to retrieve the node list I want
<img alt="1" src="file.gif"/>
<img alt="2" src="file.gif"/>
<img alt="3" src="file.gif"/>
<img alt="4" src="file.gif"/>
As it is a node list I can then iterate on the nodes to retrieve the attribute value I am looking for, but is there an XPath way of doing it? I would have expected to be able to write something like:
//div[@id='marker']/preceding-sibling::img@alt
or //div[@id='marker']/preceding-sibling@alt::img
but I don't even know if it is possible once you have used an XPath Axe
like preceding-sibling.
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