XPath 2.0 tips

Learn about XPath 2.0 functions, examples, and issues.

On this page:

XPath 2.0 functions

Functions in Bold are only available in 2.0. The others are also supported by XPath 1.0.

Purpose	Example functions
General string handling	lower-case, upper-case, substring, substring-before, substring-after, translate, starts-with, ends-with, contains, string-length, concat, normalize-space, normalize-unicode
Regular expressions	matches, replace, tokenize
Arithmetic	count, sum, avg, min, max , round, floor, ceiling, abs
Dates and times	adjust-dateTime-to-timezone, current-dateTime, day-from-dateTime, month-from-dateTime, days-from-duration, months-from-duration, etc.
Properties of nodes	name, node-name, local-name, namespace-uri, base-uri, nilled

Use the matches() function with regular expressions. For example:
```
//*[matches(@text,‘.*5ghz$')]
```
is the equivalent of:
```
//*[ends-with(@text,'5ghz')]
```
XPath 2.0 is more flexible with case. You no longer need to use the translate() function for this.

The 3rd parameter of the matches() function ‘i’ means case insensitive. New lower-case() and upper-case() functions are available.

You can shorten the existing XPath:

//*[@resource-id=“com.perfectomobile.example.test.home:id/btnNewSalePage"]

to the following:

//*[matches(@resource-id,'.*newsalepage','i')]

XPath 1.0 compatibility warning

The contains() function behaves differently with XPath 2.0. This type of statement will cause an error:

//*[contains(text(),’ABC’)]

Change this type of XPath to one of the following: