I recently needed to examine a number of XML files and print out the element names that contained text greater than X number of characters. In addition I also need to print the location of that element within the XML document.

i.e. given the following document

  
    Microsoft Visual C# Step by Step
  

…if I was interested in book titles that had more then 10 characters I would want to see:

/bookshop/book/title/
Microsoft Visual C# Step by Step

Whilst it is straightforward to return the text node, finding the XPATH location proved to be more challenging than I initially thought. The reason being is that whilst XPATH 3.0 introduced the path() function that returns the current XPATH location, the number of programming languages that I know (PL/SQL, Python and C#) do not implement XPATH 3.0 yet.

As a result I had to build my own utility. I chose to write this in C# as this is a language I have spent the past 18 months learning and I am now looking for real world problems I can solve using it.

The utility can be found on github. The “engine” of the utility is copied from this Stackoverflow answer: http://stackoverflow.com/a/241291/55640 provided by Jon Skeet.

Although far from feature complete I hope it will give someone facing a similar challenge a head start.

Let me know what you think.