Get nodes where child node contains an attribute

Question

Suppose I have the following XML:

  
  Dante Alighieri<         


        

Answer 1

Try

//book[title/@lang = 'it']

This reads:

• get all book elements
  • that have at least one title
    • which has an attribute lang
      • with a value of "it"

You may find this helpful — it's an article entitled "XPath in Five Paragraphs" by Ronald Bourret.

But in all honesty, //book[title[@lang='it']] and the above should be equivalent, unless your XPath engine has "issues." So it could be something in the code or sample XML that you're not showing us -- for example, your sample is an XML fragment. Could it be that the root element has a namespace, and you aren't counting for that in your query? And you only told us that it didn't work, but you didn't tell us what results you did get.