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Querying XML documents with Xpath



Hi,
first of all thank you very much for your reply, I found the right syntax!
You are perfectly right when you say that XPath is not very suited to
search text spanning multiple nodes, but I don't know any big alternatives
(very different from Xpath) that allows to take in account the semantic
markup given to a XML doc.
In my opinion the point is that if the XML doc is very well semantically
tagged, the queries that have sense are the ones that specify always the
context tag: for example
Java as a "computer language", BMW as a "car",...
In that case no queies spanning nodes would be useful.
Otherwise there will be always the problems found in the nowadays search
engine.
Marco
  

>Regarding full text search with XPath, one can use it for that, but I
>don't think it would work well. First you need some sort of indexing
>mechanism and an XPath processor supporting it (which does currently not
>exist AFAIK, at least as Open Source). Second, XPath is not very suited to
>search text spanning multiple nodes e.g.

>a <b>simple</b> text

>If one wants to search for 'a simple text', writing an XPath query which
>covers all posibilities of text-tag-combination would be painfull (if not
>even impossible).

>Of course it would be great having full text search for XML documents, but
>I don't think XPath is the way to go. (If somebody proves the opposite, I
>would be happy to change my mind ;-)

>best regards,

>Conny Krappatsch


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______________________________________________________________________
Conny Krappatsch                              mailto:conny@smb-tec.com
SMB GmbH                                        http://www.smb-tec.com