I had a problem in JSP and JSTL where I could not get a core variable to contain the content of an XML XPath expression.
Following a combination of reading a book, searching the Internet and speaking to a colleague, I found two solutions to my problem, but unfortunately not an answer to the question of why my original code does not work.
Here is a code: fragment
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/xml" prefix="x" %>
<head>
<title>JSTL / JSP test</title>
</head>
<body>
<%--c:import url="/xml_files/document.xml" var="url"/>
<x:parse xml="${url}" var="doc" scope="page" /--%>
<x:parse var="doc" scope="page">
<root_element>
<more_elements>
<element_name>the element value</element_name>
</more_elements>
</root_element>
</x:parse>
<table>
<tr>
<td>This doesn't work; why?</td>
<x:set var="element_value1" scope="page"
select="string($doc/root_element/more_elements/element_name/text())"/>
<td><c:out value="${element_value1}"/></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>This does work</td>
<x:set var="element_node2" scope="page"
select="$doc/root_element/more_elements/element_name"/>
<x:set var="element_value2" scope="page"
select="string($element_node2/text())"/>
<td><c:out value="${element_value2}"/></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>This works too</td>
<c:set var="element_value3" scope="page">
<x:out select="$doc/root_element/more_elements/element_name"/>
</c:set>
<td><c:out value="${element_value3}"/></td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
This was run on Apache Tomcat 6.0.
