dekiscript and xpath

[irabinovitch]

Hello,

I've noticed that when using web.text and an xpath query only the first result of the xpath query is returned.
Is there anyway to return a list of the entire result set? For example the following query against this feed (http://www.govtrack.us/data/us/108/bills/h107.xml) should return all 26 id attributes for <cosponsors> tag.

XPATH QUERY :
//cosponsors/cosponsor/@id


But when combining it with web.text it only prints out the first result: 400001

web.text('http://www.govtrack.us/data/us/108/bills/h107.xml', '//cosponsors/cosponsor/@id')

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Ilan

[SteveB]

I'm working on adding web.list, which will return a list of strings for a given xpath, but currently it's not possible unless you use an explicit index in the xpath expression.

For example: //cosponsors/cosponsor[15]/@id

[irabinovitch]

Steve, thanks for the reply.

Originally what I was trying to do is find out if a specific ID existed in a feed. So //cosponsors/cosponsor[@id=40001]. However, I wasn't sure how to check for that as web.text with that xpath query would return a blank string as the tag has no contents, just an attribute.

I was going for the list, as I thought it might be easier to get a full list of tags and do a string match against the list. Would web.list be the way to go in the future?

A 2nd way I thought about doing this was using a eval:if with the test being the xpath. I'm not sure if that would work though and will likely try it in the morning.

Thank you for all of your help!
-Ilan

[SteveB]

This xpath would work: //cosponsors/cosponsor[@id=40001]/@id

It's a bit weird, but does the trick. It looks for a cosonsor element with id=40001 and then, if it finds it, returns the value of the id.