Query within an XML document

First of all, please , notice that the provided text is not a well-formed xml document, as it has many top-level elements.

Suppose the following were the xml document you were talking about:

<World>

<Country>

<CNo>1</CNo>

<Country>Afghanistan</Country>

<Nationality>Afghan</Nationality>

<ISDCode>93</ISDCode>

<Continent>Asia</Continent>

</Country>

<Country>

<CNo>2</CNo>

<Country>Albania</Country>

<Nationality>Albanian</Nationality>

<ISDCode>355</ISDCode>

<Continent>Europe</Continent>

</Country>

<Country>

<CNo>3</CNo>

<Country>Algeria</Country>

<Nationality>Algerian</Nationality>

<ISDCode>213</ISDCode>

<Continent>Africa</Continent>

</Country>

</World>

Then one way to find the continent, in which a country (say, Albania) is situated is:

/*/*[Country='Albania']/Continent

If you just need the text value of this element, then use:

/*/*[Country='Albania']/Continent/text()

If what you have already is the element:

<Country>Albania</Country>

Then to select its corresponding continent use:

following-sibling::Continent

Or a complete absolute XPath expression will be:

/*/*/Country[.='Albania']/following-sibling::Continent

I would shamelessly recommend using the XPath Visualizer tool for learning XPath just by playing with different XPath expressions.

Hope this helped.

Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev

Dimitre_Novatchev at 2007-8-31 >