Simultaneously escape double and single quotes in Xpath

Question

Similar to How to deal with single quote in xpath, I want to escape single quotes. The difference is that I can\'t exclude the possibility that a double quote might also app

Answer 1

Because you are using string manipulation to build your XPath expression, it's your responsibility that the expression is valid XPath. This expression:

//*[contains(.,concat('Fat"',"her's son"))]

Selects:

Fat"her's son

Test in here

It would be a better approach to use an XPath string variable, but it looks like R doesn't have an API for that, even using libxml.