XPath with multiple conditions

Question

What XPath can I use to select any category with a name attribute specified and any child node author with the value specified.

I\'ve tried different variations of t

Answer 1

Use:

/category[@name='Sport' and author/text()[1]='James Small']

or use:

/category[@name='Sport' and author[starts-with(.,'James Small')]]

It is a good rule to try to avoid using the // pseudo-operator whenever possible, because its evaluation can typically be very slow.

Also:

./somename

is equivalent to:

somename

so it is recommended to use the latter.