How to find descendant elements up to a certain depth in XPath?

user_338825 0
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I want to search for a XML node, but limiting the search to a certain depth? What is the expression for that?

For example, I want to find all article tags, but exclude nested article tags, so only id 1 and 2.


<div id="timeline">
...
    <article id="1"> </article>
    <article id="2">
       ...
       <article id=3> </article>
    </article>
</div>
xpath xml
1 Answers

This XPath,

//article[not(ancestor::article)]

will select all article elements that have no article ancestors, so for your example XML, it will only select article elements with id attribute values of 1 or 2.

To more generally limit selection based upon depth (as is asked in your question's title), the number of ancestors can be counted:

  • //article[count(ancestor::article) < 3] for those article elements with less than three article ancestors.
  • //article[count(ancestor::*) < 3] for those article elements with less than three ancestors of any type.
  • //*[count(ancestor::*) < 3] for any elements with less than three ancestors.
user_2900850
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