Select xml node by attribute name ignoring namespace of that attribute

Question

I have a node like this:

I want to be able to select this element i

Answer 1

Use:

//meta[@*[local-name() = 'description']]

This selects all meta elements in the XML document that have an attribute with local-name "description".

By definition, the standard XPath function local-name() produces the name of the node from which the namespace prefix (if any) is stripped off.

Do note: Always avoid using the // pseudo operator if the structure of the XML document is statically known. Often using // causes slow execution.

Answer 2

Using XPath 2 you could do:

 /meta[ends-with(@name, 'description')]

For XPath 1 we need:

 /meta['description' = substring(@name, string-length(@name) - string-length('description') + 1)]