RE: Xpath 1.0 Question : Excluding Attributes?

Abel,

Thank you the excellent explanation - it helps me a lot.

Simon

-----Original Message-----
From: Abel Braaksma [mailto:abel.online@xxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: March 29, 2007 1:49 AM
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re:  Xpath 1.0 Question : Excluding Attributes?

Simon Shutter wrote:
> Hi Abel,
>
> Sorry for the confusion.  I meant only attribute nodes so I assume from
your
> examples that I have to put the entire path before each attribute of
> interest.
>
> Ie // tier1 / tier2 / @attrb1 | // tier1 / tier2 / @attrb2
>
>
> Is there a way to exclude specific attributes in Xpath 1.0?

Well, like I said, usually the easiest way to do that is by using an 
identity transform (see my examples), but I haven't seen your code so I 
can't tell it's the right approach.

With any of your XPaths, however, this works for excluding attributes:

//tier1/tier2/@*[not(local-name() = 'exclude-me')]

and this with QNames:

//tier1/tier2/@*[not(name() = 'ns:exclude-me')]

Finally, you may have hoped this would work, like it does for normal axis:

//tier1/tier2/@*[not(self::exclude-me)]

but then you try to test for the self::node() being an 'exclude-me' 
element node, but self::node() is not an element, it is an attribute 
(the reason is, technically speaking, that the principal node kind of 
self:: is the element node, and you can't switch that). Unfortunately, 
XPath does not have a way to express a self::node() axis when the axis 
is the attribute axis. I.e., this won't work (illegal):

//tier1/tier2/@*[not(self::@exclude-me)]

XPath 2.0 has a workaround for this (also note the way of using 
parenthesis, which is not legal for XPath 1.0, but in this case saves a 
lot of re-typing the parent path):

//tier1/tier2/(@* except @exclude-me)


HTH,
-- Abel Braaksma
   http://www.nuntia.nl