XPath : comparing a value that starts with a prefix

[Xuejun Li \(SH/RDC\)]

Hi,
How do I select a value that starts with a certain prefix? For example I
want all <author> elements that contain a <last-name> element with a value
that begins with the letter Mi. Will this work? Or it will also match "Ni"?
author[last-name &gt; "Mi"]
A more general question, how do a match against a regular expression?
Thanks
Li Xuejun

 

[Martin Honnen]

How do I select a value that starts with a certain prefix? For example I
want all <author> elements that contain a <last-name> element with a value
that begins with the letter Mi. Will this work? Or it will also match "Ni"?
author[last-name &gt; "Mi"]

There are string functions in XPath 1.0,
author[starts-with(last-name, 'Mi')]

A more general question, how do a match against a regular expression?

XPath 1.0 has no support for regular expressions matching, with XPath
2.0 there will probably support for that, at least the current working
draft has some functions like matches which takes a string to match
against a string interpreted as a regular expression pattern.