xpath and java (SDK 5)

[clive jordan]

Hi Guys,

I have a problem using xpath from within java. I have an example XML file that looks somethink like this:

  
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
 
<catalog>
<cd>
<title>Empire Burlesque</title>
<artist>Bob Dylan</artist>
<country>USA</country>
<company>Columbia</company>
<price>10.90</price>
<year>1985</year>
</cd>
<cd>
<title>Hide your heart</title>
<artist>Bonnie Tyler</artist>
<country>UK</country>
<company>CBS Records</company>
<price>9.90</price>
<year>1988</year>
</cd>
</catalog>

And some very simple java code to parse it (I've removed all te try/catch blocks and function calls to just show the relevant parts):

  
DocumentBuilder builder = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder();
 
doc = builder.parse( new File( dbFile ) );
 
XPath xpath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();

String res = null;
res = (String)xpath.evaluate( searchTerm, doc );

where dbFile is the path to the XML file iven earlier.

When searchTerm= "/catalog", a get a string representation of all the nodes in the xml document as expected.

If search term is either:
/catalog//cd
or
//cd

I only get the first cd node returned. I would have expected to have all cd nodes returned. What am I doning wrong here ??

Note: /catalog/cd[1] and /catalog/cd[2] work as expected.

Any ideas ?

Clive

[Paul Clapham]

I think maybe you're expecting incorrectly? I can't tell from the documentation, but I think it's possible that converting a node-set to a string just picks the first node from the set and returns its string value. This is how <xsl:value-of> in XSLT handles a node-set, for example. Try returning a node-set instead, something like:

NodeList res = (NodeList)xpath.evaluate( searchTerm, doc, XPathConstants.NODESET );

[clive jordan]

Hi Paul,

I appreciate your reply. This makes sense, at least I can see what is going on now. Thanks again !

Clive