XPath Concat() Function

[Thedj2222]

Hi everyone,

I need some help using XPath to retrieve data from an XML file. The example XML is below:

<Date>
<Year>2008</Year>
<Month>02</Month>
<Day>01</Day>
</Date>

I am using VB.NET to execute the XPath, so it will look something like:

... XPathNavigator.Select("/Date[concat(day, month, year)]")

No matter what i have tried, all i can get it to return is '20080201', which is in the wrong format (i.e. it should return '01022008').

In fact, it doesnt matter what i put in the concat function (e.g. it could be [concat(blah, blah, blah)], it would still return '20080201'. It appears to be just reading the text values of its child nodes.

My questions are:

1. Is the Concat function capable of doing what i need it to do (i.e. concatenating nodes in a particular order)? If so, where am i going wrong?

2. If the Concat function is not capable of this, how can i achieve what i want to do?

Thank you for any help you can give.

Rich

 

[k5tm]

Rich,

Your first clue might have been that, since XML (and therefore XPath) is case sensitive, your example of [tt]Date[concat([COLOR=blue white]d[/color]ay, [COLOR=blue white]m[/color]onth, [COLOR=blue white]y[/color]ear)]"[/tt] might not return anything useful.

Have you tried the following XPath expression?

concat(Date/Day, Date/Month, Date/Year)

In general, when you have square brackets it is a predicate that is used to constrain the choice of nodes at that particular point in the expression. For example, [tt]//Date[Year = '2008'] [/tt]would select all the Date nodes that have a subordinate Year element the value of which is 2008.

Tom Morrison

http://www.liant.com