XPath : select all following siblings until another sibling

Question

Here is an excerpt of my xml :

<node/>
<node/>
<node id="1">content</node>
<node/>
<node/>
<node/>
<node id="2">content</node>
<node/>
<node/>

I am positioned in the node[@id='1']. I need an Xpath to match all the <node/> elements until the next not empty node (here node[@id='2']).

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Edit: the @id attributes are only to explain my problem more clearly, but are not in my original XML. I need a solution which does not use the @id attributes.

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I do not want to match the empty siblings after node[@id='2'], so I can't use a naive following-sibling::node[text()=''].

How can I achieve this ?

Answer 1

You could do it this way:

../node[not(text()) and preceding-sibling::node[@id][1][@id='1']]

where '1' is the id of the current node (generate the expression dynamically).

The expression says:

• from the current context go to the parent
• select those child nodes that
• have no text and
• from all "preceding sibling nodes that have an id" the first one must have an id of 1

If you are in XSLT you can select from the following-sibling axis because you can use the current() function:

<!-- the for-each is merely to switch the current node -->
<xsl:for-each select="node[@id='1']">
  <xsl:copy-of select="
    following-sibling::node[
      not(text()) and
      generate-id(preceding-sibling::node[@id][1])
      =
      generate-id(current())
    ]
  " />
</xsl:for-each>

or simpler (and more efficient) with a key:

<xsl:key 
  name="kNode" 
  match="node[not(text())]" 
  use="generate-id(preceding-sibling::node[@id][1])"
/>

<xsl:copy-of select="key('kNode', generate-id(node[@id='1']))" />

Answer 2

XPath 2.0 has the operators '<<' and '>>' where node1 << node2 is true if node1 precedes node2 in document order. So based on that with XPath 2.0 in an XSLT 2.0 stylesheet where the current node is the node[@id = '1'] you could use

  following-sibling::node[not(text()) and . << current()/following-sibling::node[@od][1]]

That also needs the current() function from XSLT, so that is why I said "with XPath 2.0 in an XSLT 2.0 stylesheet". The syntax above is pure XPath, in an XSLT stylesheet you would need to escape '<<' as '&lt;&lt;'.

Answer 3

This might be of use: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2063619/how-to-reformat-xml-with-group-adjacent-xslt