Daniel Lemire's blog

, 2 min read

Current state of affairs in the XML world (according to me)

2 thoughts on “Current state of affairs in the XML world (according to me)”

  1. Difficult to tell what your problem is… you tried to post XML, but, of course, the < and > tags disappear.

    I suspect you’ve got a namespace issue: the xpath expression /html/head/title doesn’t work if html, head and title are in a namespace.

    You need to define a namepspace and modify your xpath expression accordingly. It is a pain, but that’s the name of the game.

  2. Dick Adams says:

    Glad to hear some honest commnets on the state of XML. I’ve been having a devil of a time trying to use Java 5.0’s new XPath functionality with XHTML. For example, javax.xml.xpath handles the following sample XML document just fine:

    Virtual Library

    Moved to vlib.org.

    However, when you add the extra data to make it an XHTML document, like this (taken from http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/conformance.html), you can no longer get even the title from the document:

    Virtual Library

    Moved to vlib.org.

    It doesn’t throw an exception, it just reurns null objects or empty strings. Here’s the code I ran against both documents:

    XPathFactory factory=XPathFactory.newInstance();
    XPath xPath = factory.newXPath();
    File xmlDocument = new File(“c:\tmp\test.htm”);
    InputSource inputSource = new InputSource(new FileInputStream(xmlDocument));
    XPathExpression expression = xPath.compile(“/html/head/title”);
    String title = expression.evaluate(inputSource);
    System.out.println(title);

    Have you encountered this problem with XHTML?