[jdom-interest] XPath and Namespaces
bob at werken.com
Fri Jul 26 05:59:48 PDT 2002
On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Laurent Bihanic wrote:
> From the Javadoc of Jaxen's NamespaceContext: "In XPath, there is no such
> thing as a 'default namespace'. The empty prefix *always* resolves to the
> empty namespace URI."
> I haven't verified against the XPath spec but this clearly indicates you can't
> use "" as namespace prefix in XPath.
> You should fill a bug against Jaxen requesting XPath.addNamespace to throw an
> exception if the passed namespace prefix is empty.
It's a PITA, sure, but it is indeed compliant, as we read the spec.
I can see why it's that way (so that xpaths can truly be independent from
the document they are applied to), but it does trip folks up a lot.
More information about the jdom-interest