Re: [xsl] How to select for ' in XPATH?

[Martin Honnen <Martin.Honnen@xxxxxx>]

Hermann Stamm-Wilbrandt wrote:

> My real problem seems to be that I need a XPATH 1.0 solution since
> I want to do this in a browser environment, right?
>
>
> The real problem is as follows:
> - open an arbitrary web page in Firefox browser
>
> - with a bookmarklet do an arbitrary selection in that page
>   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookmarklet)
>
> - then the bookmarklet generates eg. the following xpath:
>   "//*[contains(normalize-space(.),'xyz')]"
>   where xyz is replaced by the actual selection data
>
> - then Mozilla's document.evaluate() is used to determine the
>   corresponding node in the DOM


> Any hint what can be done to make this work?
> (I have no control over the webpage nor control over user selection)

XPath 1.0 has no escape mechanism for string literals. Unless you can 
use variables (and I don't know of a way with document.evaluate to do 
that) you are left with breaking up the string into components that 
contain no single quote and components that contain a single quote and 
then concatenate them e.g. if the selection on the page is e.g.
What's that?
you use
"//*[contains(., concat('What', \"'\", ' that?')"
Implementing breaking up the string with JavaScript should be possible 
although having to stuff all that into a bookmarklet might get ugly.


--

	Martin Honnen
	http://msmvps.com/blogs/martin_honnen/