Encoding XPath Expressions with both single and double quotes

Question

XPath (v1) contains no way to encode expressions.

If you only have single OR double quotes then you can use expressions such as

//review[@name=\"Bob         


        

Answer 1

I was in need of this so I created this solution, for C#.

    /// 

    /// Returns a valid XPath statement to use for searching attribute values regardless of 's or "s
    /// 
    /// Attribute value to parse
    /// Parsed attribute value in concat() if needed
    public static string GetXpathStringForAttributeValue(string attributeValue)
    {
        bool hasApos = attributeValue.Contains("'");
        bool hasQuote = attributeValue.Contains("\"");

        if (!hasApos)
        {
            return "'" + attributeValue + "'";
        }
        if (!hasQuote)
        {
            return "\"" + attributeValue + "\"";
        }

        StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder("concat(");
        StringBuilder currentArgument = new StringBuilder();
        for (int pos = 0; pos < attributeValue.Length; pos++)
        {
            switch (attributeValue[pos])
            {
                case '\'':
                    result.Append('\"');
                    result.Append(currentArgument.ToString());
                    result.Append("'\",");
                    currentArgument.Length = 0;
                    break;
                case '\"':
                    result.Append('\'');
                    result.Append(currentArgument.ToString());
                    result.Append("\"\',");
                    currentArgument.Length = 0;
                    break;
                default:
                    currentArgument.Append(attributeValue[pos]);
                    break;
            }
        }
        if (currentArgument.Length == 0)
        {
            result[result.Length - 1] = ')';
        }
        else
        {
            result.Append("'");
            result.Append(currentArgument.ToString());
            result.Append("')");
        }
        return result.ToString();
    }