👀 Views: 0 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-07-11

xml xpath java Java

I'm optimizing some code but Hey everyone, I'm running into an issue that's driving me crazy. I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about I'm working on parsing an XML document using XPath in Java, but I'm encountering issues when trying to select specific nodes that contain mixed content. The XML structure looks something like this: ```xml <root> <item> Some text <bold>bold text</bold> more text </item> <item> Another item with <italic>italic text</italic> </item> </root> ``` I want to select all `<item>` nodes that contain the word 'bold' in them. However, my XPath expression: ```java String expression = "//item[contains(., 'bold')]"; ``` is returning an empty result set, which I didn't expect. I've tried running the XPath expression against different XML tools, and it works fine, but in my Java code, it seems to fail. I'm using Java 11 with the standard libraries for XML processing, specifically `javax.xml.xpath` and `org.w3c.dom`. Here’s a snippet of my code: ```java import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder; import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory; import javax.xml.xpath.XPath; import javax.xml.xpath.XPathConstants; import javax.xml.xpath.XPathExpression; import javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactory; import org.w3c.dom.Document; import org.w3c.dom.NodeList; public class XmlParser { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance(); DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder(); Document document = builder.parse("path/to/your/file.xml"); XPathFactory xpathFactory = XPathFactory.newInstance(); XPath xpath = xpathFactory.newXPath(); XPathExpression expr = xpath.compile(expression); NodeList nodeList = (NodeList) expr.evaluate(document, XPathConstants.NODESET); System.out.println("Nodes found: " + nodeList.getLength()); } } ``` I've checked the XML content, and it loads correctly. The parsing works without issues, but the XPath query just doesn't return the nodes as expected. I've also tried using `normalize-space()` to strip out potential whitespace issues, but that didn't help. The `NodeList` always ends up being empty. Does anyone have insights into why this XPath expression might not be selecting nodes with mixed content in Java? Any advice or alternative approaches would be much appreciated. For context: I'm using Java on Ubuntu. Is there a better approach? For context: I'm using Java on Ubuntu. Has anyone else encountered this? My development environment is Ubuntu. Any ideas what could be causing this? I'm coming from a different tech stack and learning Java.