haliphax

Now that you're able to load XML and transform it using an XSL stylesheet, wouldn't it be handy to also be able to perform XPath selects/functions on that XML outside of the stylesheet's formatting? Why, yes. Yes, it would:

Javascript code:

function xpSelect(xmlDoc, xpathStr) {
	try {
		if (xmlDoc.evaluate) {
			// WebKit (Safari, Chrome), Mozilla/Firefox, Opera, etc.
			var xpr = xmlDoc.evaluate(
				xpathStr,
				xmlDoc,
				null,
				XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_ITERATOR_TYPE,
				null,
			);
			var cur = xpr.iterateNext();
			var a = 0;
			var retarr = [];

			// build array from returned nodes
			while (cur) {
				retarr[a++] = cur;
				cur = xpr.iterateNext();
			}

			return retarr;
		} else {
			// Internet Explorer
			return xmlDoc.selectNodes(xpathStr);
		}
	} catch (e) {
		alert("Error:\n" + e.message);
		return false;
	}
}

It's worth noting that IE's selectNodes() method is drastically slower than the standard evaluate() method, but this function's results will be the same: an array of element objects. The function is rather base in its implementation, but could be modified to return custom data sets (or a DOM tree/node) instead of an array. Either way, //state[@name='Alabama']/areacode is just a function call away!