Single-Node XPaths

A single-node XPath is an XPath expression using a subset of XPath constructs and having a normalised form. A single-node XPath will always resolve to zero or one node when evaluated against any document.

A single-node XPath is composed of a sequence of single-node XPath parts. A single-node XPath part is made up of the following sequence of tokens:

• "/"
• The node name: a qualified element name of the form "prefix:localName", or "text()"
• "["
• The index: a non-negative integer
• "]"

Expanded Form

A single-node XPath can be converted into an expanded form by replacing all the prefixes of all the node names in the original path with the following sequence:

• " "
• The namespace URI corresponding which the prefix of the node name maps to
• " "
• The local element name of the node name

An expanded form of a single-node XPath is not a valid XPath expression. Two single-node XPaths evaluated on the same document will return the same result if and only if they convert to the same expanded form. Therefore, two single-node XPaths can be compared for equivalence without evaluating against any document.

Generating Single-Node XPaths

Given a node in a document, we can determine a single-node XPath expression for that node. We first define parent (node) and indexOfChild (parentNode, childNode) as follows:

• parent (node) is the parent node of node in the same document
• indexOfChild (parentNode, childNode) is the index of childNode in parentNode's list of child nodes

We define singleNodeXPath (node), which gives a single-node XPath for node, as follows.

• If node is the root element of the document, then singleNodeXPath (node) is: "/", the node's name, "[", 0, "]".
• Otherwise, singleNodeXPath (node) is: singleNodeXPath (parent (node)), "/", the node's name, "[", indexOfChild (parent(node), node), "]".

-- SimonMiles - 13 Mar 2006
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