Select Element in a Namespace with XPath

Question

I want to select the topmost element in a document that has a given namespace (prefix). More specifically: I have XML documents that either start with /html/body (in the XHTML namespace) or with one of several elements in a particular namespace. I effectively want to strip out /html/body and just return the body contents OR the entire root namespaced element.

Accepted Answer

In XPath 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 you can test against the namespace prefix using the in-scope-prefixes() function in a predicate. e.g.

```
//*[in-scope-prefixes(.)='html']
```

If you cant use v2, in XPath 1.0 you can use the namespace-uri() function to test against the namespace itself. e.g.

```
//*[namespace-uri()='http://www.w3c.org/1999/xhtml']
```

Select Element in a Namespace with XPath

Solution

Problem