Seems like I'm trying to do "hard" things with Xpath these days. I wish
there were a dedicated XPath mailing list or FAQ ... or is it that I'm
the only one trying to use XPath in this way?
I'm passing an XPath back from an HTML form as a parameter to an XSLT
stylesheet. I'm also passing a value to insert into that location,
using, XUpdate (specifically XML::XUpdate::LibXML in perl). I'd like to
then test the source document for the stylesheet, to see if that XPath
is valid. OK, that's easy, I just test="/Big/Long/XPath" but wait, if
it's /not/ present then I want to create sufficient nodes to insert the
new element in that place. That means I want to test each location step
in the XPath, one by one, from root to leaf, to see if it's there. If
it isn't, I then create a new node for that location step, and then
descend the rest of the XPath, creating nodes until I'm done and then I
insert the value. Here's an example of what I want to have happen:
source XML docu:
<resume>
<header>
<name>
<first>Simon</first>
</name>
</header>
</resume>
params from HTML forms into XSLT:
XPath: /resume/header/address/country
Value: XLandia
result XML docu:
<resume>
<header>
<name>
<first>Simon</first>
</name>
<address>
<country>
XLandia
</country>
</address>
</header>
</resume>
How do I do that? There doesn't seem to be any convenient way to break
apart and analyse xpath steps in the spec, and I /don't/ want to start
messing around with string conversions...
simon
---
www.simonwoodside.com
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