How can I use XPath to find the minimum value of an attribute in a set of elements?

Question

If I have XML like:

<foo>
  <bar id="1" score="192" />
  <bar id="2" score="227" />
  <bar id="3" score="105" />
  ...
</foo>

Can I use XPath to find the minimum and maximum values of score?

Edit: The tool i'm using (Andariel ant tasks) doesn't support the XPath 2.0 solution.

Answer 1

This should work ...

max(foo/bar/@score)

... and ...

min(foo/bar/@score)

... check out this function reference.

Answer 2

Try this:

//foo/bar[not(preceding-sibling::bar/@score <= @score) and not(following-sibling::bar/@score <= @score)]

Maybe this will work on XPath 1.0.

Answer 3

Turns out the tool does not support XPath 2.0.

XPath 1.0 doesn't have the fancy min() and max() functions, so to find these values we need to be a little tricky with the XPath logic, and compare the values on the siblings of the node:

Maximum:

/foo/bar[not(preceding-sibling::bar/@score >= @score) 
    and not(following-sibling::bar/@score > @score)]/@score

Minimum:

/foo/bar[not(preceding-sibling::bar/@score <= @score) 
    and not(following-sibling::bar/@score < @score)]/@score

Answer 4

Here's a slightly shorter solution.

Maximum:

/foo/bar/@score[not(. < ../../bar/@score)][1]

Minimum:

/foo/bar/@score[not(. > ../../bar/@score)][1]

I've edited the predicate so that it's applicable to any sequence of bar, even if you decide to change the path. Note that parent of attribute is the element to which it belongs.