Not able to access textnodes per XPath expression

[spyro]

Hi there,

In my current project I'm looping through the member elements of a nodeset trying to concatenate all descendant textnodes of them in a string using the node.getNodesByXpath-instruction. I can access attribut values without problems but I'm not able to read the content of the text itself.

I made a dead-simple testdocument like this:

  Hello world!
  What's up?”

To access the text “What's up?” I use the xpath-instruction “//element[2]/text()”.

Inside a XMetaL-macro the line

msgbox activeDocument.DocumentElement.getNodesByXpath(“element[2]/text()”).item(0).nodevalue

returns a empty string instead of the expected “What's up?”. The property “length” gives me the value “0” instead of 1. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks,
Rupert Jung

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[tonys]

My guess is that you're seeing text nodes containing white space that you're not expecting. For example, the newline between and will probably appear as a text node.

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[dcramer]

Try

msgbox activeDocument.DocumentElement.getNodesByXpath(“//element[2]/text()”).item(0).nodevalue

(added // before “element” in the xpath)

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[spyro]

Hello dcramer,

you're right, of course. I forgot this to add this to my post here in the first case (I've corrected that know). My problem is, that exactly this expression “//element[2]/text()” doesn't give me the expected result.

Furthermore I am not able to correctly address the content within element 1 with the expression “//element[1]//text()” which should deliver 2 textnodes (“Hello ” and “world!”) instead of an empty element.

spyro

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