XPath (SimpleXML) selection of child based on value of child's sibling

Question

I\'m using SimpleXML (Java) and I\'m trying to get a List of objects based on the value of one of the siblings of the list.

So, here\'s my XML:

Answer 1

1. Your xml example is not well-formed. The link element doesn't have its closing counterpart. The same applies for the description el. I assume these are just typos.
2. Here is the working XPath expression:

/metadata/resources/resource/links/link[parent::links/preceding-sibling::ittype/text()=='Service_Links']

or much simpler version:

/metadata/resources/resource[ittype = 'Service_Links']/links/link

Answer 2

I never got SimpleXml to implement this style of XPath; from reading through their docs more thoroughly, it looks like they haven't implemented this XPath feature yet.

So I settled on a different XML-parsing strategy here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/13236117/483257

Answer 3

I don't know about SimpleXML specifically, but this xpath should get you the elements you want:

metadata/resources/resource[ittype = 'Service_Links']