XML - get node by name

Thanks a lot to Gabor and Duncan!

I didn't know that XPath is a standard. I'll give it a deeper look to better
understand it.

Oh, I guess I understand a bit more

xpathApply(doc, "//val", function(n) xmlValue(n))

would search globally for all nodes named "val" and return its values :-)
So that's excactly what I was looking for. Not caring about the exact
location of a node.
I think, in my case it should be okay, to parse for nodes just by their
names.

Thanks again!

@ Ajay: Sorry, but I was looking for a solution with R
@ Dirk: I already used the XML package but didn't know the possibilities to
access data as I was used to.



Antje schrieb:

Hi there,

I try to rewrite some Java-code with R. It deals with reading XML files. I
started with the XML package. In Java, I had a very useful method which gave
me a node by using:

name of the node
index of appearance
start point: global (false) / local (true)

So, I could do something like this.

setCurrentChildNode("data", 0);
getValueOfElement("val",1,true);
--> gives 45

setCurrentChildNode("data", 1);
getValueOfElement("val",1,true);
--> gives 11

getValueOfElement("val",1,false);
--> gives 45

<root>
 <data loc="1">
   <val i="t1"> 22 </val>
   <val i="t2"> 45 </val>
 </data>
 <data loc="2">
   <val i="t1"> 44 </val>
   <val i="t2"> 11 </val>
 </data>
</root>

Now, I'd like to do something like this in R. Most important would be to
retrieve a node just by its name, not by the whole path. How is it possible?

Can anybody help me with this issue?

Antje