XPath to get all child nodes (elements, comments, and text) without parent

Question

I need an XPath to fetch all ChildNodes ( including Text Element, Comment Element & Child Elements ) without Parent Element. Any help

Sample Example:

<         


        

Answer 1

From the documentation of XPath ( http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath/#location-paths ):

child::* selects all element children of the context node

child::text() selects all text node children of the context node

child::node() selects all the children of the context node, whatever their node type

So I guess your answer is:

$doc/PRESENTEDIN/X/child::node()

And if you want a flatten array of all nested nodes:

$doc/PRESENTEDIN/X/descendant::node()

Answer 2

Use this XPath expression:

/*/*/X/node()

This selects any node (element, text node, comment or processing instruction) that is a child of any X element that is a grand-child of the top element of the XML document.

To verify what is selected, here is this XSLT transformation that outputs exactly the selected nodes:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>
 <xsl:template match="/">
  <xsl:copy-of select="/*/*/X/node()"/>
 </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

and it produces exactly the wanted, correct result:

   First Text Node #1            
    <y> Y can Have Child Nodes #                
        <child> deep to it </child>
    </y>            Second Text Node #2 
    <z />

Explanation:

1. As defined in the W3 XPath 1.0 Spec, "child::node() selects all the children of the context node, whatever their node type." This means that any element, text-node, comment-node and processing-instruction node children are selected by this node-test.

2. node() is an abbreviation of child::node() (because child:: is the primary axis and is used when no axis is explicitly specified).