Different results selecting HTML elements with XPath in Firefox and Internet Explorer

Question

I\'m trying to select a specific HTML element in a document, for firefox i just use:

xpathobj = document.evaluate(xpath, document, null,
               XPath         


        

Answer 1

Take a look at http://dev.abiss.gr/sarissa/ project. They have migrated most of XML-related APIs to IE. Otherwise it is indeed also easy to implement. The problems you would need to solve would be: serialization of HTML into valid XML, syncing result of XMLDOM XPath query with original HTMLDOM. To my knowledge they've done it in their library, however, its performance could have been better.

Answer 2

I can not find a simple and common solution, you can write custom function to implement a little of xpath but it is hard to get complete in internet explorer 6 or lower version....

Answer 3

The problem may be that in IE5+ [1] is in fact [2] in FF. Microsoft solely decided that the numbering should start at [0] and not [1] as specified by w3c.

Answer 4

Hi well in the end i came up with my own dodgy solution, any sugestions on improving it would be greatly apreciated. It makes use of some prototype functionality:

Works in IE5+ with xpath of the form "/HTML/BODY/DIV[9]/DIV[2]"

function getXPathElement (xpath , element) {

//Specific to project, here i know that the body element will always have the id "top"
//but otherwise the element that is passed in should be first element in the xpath 
//statement eg. /HTML/BODY/DIV the element passed in should be HTML
if(!element){
    element = $("top");
    var xpathArrayIndex = 3;
} else {
    var xpathArrayIndex = 1;
}
//split the xpath statement up
var xpathArray = xpath.split("/");

var carryOn = true; 
while(carryOn){
    decendents = element.childElements();
    //check to see if we are at the end of the xpath statement
    if(xpathArrayIndex == xpathArray.length){
        return element;
    }
    //if there is only one decendent make it the next element
    if(decendents.size() == 1) {
        element = decendents.first();
    } else {
    //otherwise search the decendents for the next element
        element = getXPathElementByIndex(decendents, xpathArray[xpathArrayIndex]);
    }
    xpathArrayIndex++;
}

}

function getXPathElementByIndex(decendents, xpathSegment){

var decendentsArray = decendents.toArray();
//seperate the index from the element name
var temp = xpathSegment.split("[");
var elementName = temp[0];
//get the index as a number eg. "9]" to 9
var elementIndex = +temp[1].replace("]", "");
//the number of matching elements
var count = 0;

//keeps track of the number of iterations
var i = 0;
while(count != elementIndex) {
    //if the decendent's name matches the xpath element name increment the count
    if(decendentsArray[i].nodeName == elementName){
        count++;
    }
    i++;
}
var element = decendentsArray[i - 1];
return element;

}

Thanks to everyone for thier help, either way i learnt a fair bit about various javascript frameworks.