Selecting nodes where a specific child does NOT exist

[Marc Jennings]

Hi there,

I have been given a rather poor schema for an XML file in the
following format :

<item>
<key>ProductCode</key>
<value>1234-5678</value>
<key>Description</key>
<value>Widget 1</value>
<key>Price</key>
<value>199.95</value>
</item>
<item>
<key>ProductCode</key>
<value>2345-6789</value>
<key>Description</key>
<value>Widget 2</value>
<key>Price</key>
<value>149.95</value>
</item>
<item>
<key>ProductCode</key>
<value>3456-7890</value>
<key>Description</key>
<value>Widget 3</value>
<key>Price</key>
<value>299.95</value>
<key>ignore</key>
<value>true</value>
</item>
As you can see, the format is far from ideal. What I need to be able
to do is apply formatting to only those nodes that do not contain a
subnode called "ignore". The value (true) is irrelevent since this
only ever appears if the ignore element is present.

I can select the nodes to ignore in the following way
item/key[text()='ignore']/..
but I am stumped as to how to select those nodes that do not contain
the ignore flag. obviously,
item/key[text()!='ignore']/..

would not work, because it would return a node for each element that
contains a child node that is not called "ignore", and worse, it would
return them once for each child node.

Can anyone help, please?

TIA
Marc.

[Martin Honnen]

Marc Jennings wrote:

item/key[text()!='ignore']/..

You can do
item[not(key = 'ignore')]
to select item elements not having a key child with contents ignore or
if the above is what you want to change then use e.g.
item/key[not(. = 'ignore')]

--

Martin Honnen --- MVP XML
http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

[Marc Jennings]

Martin, you are a saviour! That worked beautifully.

item[not(key = 'ignore')]
Thank you.

On Fri, 18 Nov 2005 13:54:28 +0100, Martin Honnen <ma*******@yahoo.de>
wrote:


Marc Jennings wrote:

item/key[text()!='ignore']/..

You can do
item[not(key = 'ignore')]
to select item elements not having a key child with contents ignore or
if the above is what you want to change then use e.g.
item/key[not(. = 'ignore')]