Edgewall Software

Version 4 (modified by cmlenz, 18 years ago) (diff)

Updated to match XPath support in 0.2 release.

Using XPath in Markup

Markup provides basic XPath support for matching and querying event streams.

Limitations

Due to the streaming nature of the processing model, Markup uses only a subset of the XPath 1.0 language.

In particular, only the following axes are supported:

  • attribute
  • child
  • descendant
  • descendant-or-self
  • self

This means you can't use the parent, ancestor, or sibling axes in Markup (the namespace axis isn't supported either, but what you'd ever need that for I don't know). Basically, any path expression that would require buffering of the stream is not supported.

Predicates are of course supported, but Path expressions inside predicates are restricted to attribute lookups (again due to the lack of buffering).

Most of the XPath functions and operators are supported, however they (currently) only work inside predicates. The following functions are not supported:

  • count()
  • id()
  • lang()
  • last()
  • position()
  • string()
  • sum()

The mathematical operators (+, -, *, div, and mod) are not yet supported, whereas the various comparison and logical operators should work as expected.

You can also use XPath variable references ($var) inside predicates.

Querying Streams

from markup.input import XML

doc = XML('''<doc>
 <items count="2">
      <item status="new">
        <summary>Foo</summary>
      </item>
      <item status="closed">
        <summary>Bar</summary>
      </item>
  </items>
</doc>''')
print doc.select('items/item[@status="closed"]/summary/text()')

This would result in the following output:

Bar

Matching in Templates

See MarkupTemplates#py:match


See also: MarkupGuide?, MarkupStream