Using XPath in SelectSingleNode: Retrieving individual element from XML if it's present

Question

My XML looks like :

       one
       two
                


        

Answer 1

I think you want:

myXMLdoc.SelectSingleNode("/itemSet/Item[text()='two']")

In other words, you want the Item which has text of two, not the itemSet containing it.

You can also use a single dot to indicate the context node, in your case:

myXMLdoc.SelectSingleNode("/itemSet/Item[.='two']")

EDIT: The difference between . and text() is that . means "this node" effectively, and text() means "all the text node children of this node". In both cases the comparison will be against the "string-value" of the LHS. For an element node, the string-value is "the concatenation of the string-values of all text node descendants of the element node in document order" and for a collection of text nodes, the comparison will check whether any text node is equal to the one you're testing against.

So it doesn't matter when the element content only has a single text node, but suppose we had:

<root>
  <item name="first">x<foo/>y</item>
  <item name="second">xy<foo/>ab</item>
</root>

Then an XPath expression of "root/item[.='xy']" will match the first item, but "root/item[text()='xy']" will match the second.