Find XPath

[chack boom]

If I know a xml Element, how can I programaticly find xPath for this Element? Is there any free or not free software to do this? I am not looking for GUI tool. I mean PROGRAMATICALLY find xpath. Thanks

[Dave Lenton]

The problem is that a given node may have several different XPaths to get to it. For example, take the following XML:

<root>
<name id="1">Sam</name>
<name id="2">Fred></name>
<name id="3">bob</name>
</root>

The node containing "bob" could be reached by several different XPaths:

//root/name[3]
or
/root/name[last()]
or
/root/name[@id='3']
or
//name[@id='3']

and so on.

There may be tools out there to provide XPaths for a particular node, but it may just be simpler to write your own method - that way you can get the exact XPath that you want. Besides, this seems like a bit of an odd way to go about things - normally XPaths are used to find a node, not the other way around!
[ March 31, 2005: Message edited by: Dave Lenton ]

[chack boom]

I mean I know Element. I want to find xpath. For example, element.getXPath();

[Dave Lenton]

Even so, you'll still have a problem because there are usually more than one XPath for any given node or element. One option would be to write your own method for getting an XPath - you could have a method that takes an node or element and uses methods such as getParentNode() to work out the path back to the root. This may need some way of working out which child of the parent the current node/element is (e.g. first, second etc). Throw in a bit of recursion, and hey presto, a simple XPath. Alternatively this same kind of thing could be achieved using XSLT.