XPath query with descendant and descendant text() predicates

Question

I would like to construct an XPath query that will return a \"div\" or \"table\" element, so long as it has a descendant containing the text \"abc\". The one caveat is that it

Answer 1

Something different: :)

//text()[contains(.,'abc')]/ancestor::*[self::div or self::table][1]

Seems a lot shorter than the other solutions, doesn't it? :)

Translated to simple English: For any text node in the document that contains the string "abc" select its first ancestor that is either a div or a table.

This is more efficient, as only one full scan of the document tree (and not any other) is required, and the ancestor::* traversal is very cheap compared to a descendent:: (tree) scan.

To verify that this solution "really works":

when this transformation is performed on the provided XML document:

  

        
          
abcdefg
        
      

          
123456
        
    
  

the wanted, correct result is produced:

   
      
abcdefg
   

Note: It isn't necessary to use XSLT -- any XPath 1.0 host -- such as DOM, must obtain the same result.