Bug #51785 [Bgs]: No way to escape quotes for XPath

Edit report at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=51785&edit=1 ID: 51785 User updated by: pecoes at gmail dot com Reported by: pecoes at gmail dot com Summary: No way to escape quotes for XPath Status: Bogus Type: Bug Package: *XML functions Operating System: WinXP PHP Version: 5.3.2 Assigned To: rrichards New Comment: Nice! Your work-around is certainly better than mine. :) It's still a work-around, though. :( XPath variables would certainly be useful. My suggestion would have been to take unilateral action and improve the XPath standard by intoducing escape-sequences: \' \" and \\ I realize that amending a standard isn't exactly elegant, but it certainly would make things easy on the PHP-side of things. Simply treat your input with addslashes and you're good. From a user-perspective that would be the most desirable solution, I suppose. Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2010-06-18 18:08:45] rrichards@php.net simplest way is to use php functions for comparison, like compare htmlspecialchars escaped strings: $dom = new DOMDocument; $domstr = "<test>double quote: \", single quote: '</test>"; $dom->loadXML($domstr); $xpath = new DOMXPath($dom); $xpath->registerNamespace("php", "http://php.net/xpath"); $xpath->registerPHPFunctions(); $check_string = htmlspecialchars("double quote: \", single quote: '", ENT_QUOTES ); $q = "/test[php:functionString('htmlspecialchars', ., 3) = '$check_string']"; echo $q."\n"; if ($xpath->evaluate($q)->item(0)) { echo "found\r\n"; } else { echo "not found\r\n"; } There is no current plan to support XPath 2.0 although possibility of supporting xpath variables in a future PHP version ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2010-06-18 17:05:34] pecoes at gmail dot com We seem to misunderstand each other... As long as there's only one type of quote - single or double - there's no problem, but how do I escape a string with mixed quotes? How do I quote that, so that the XPath-engine won't reject it? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2010-06-18 16:50:06] rrichards@php.net Jeez. Learn to properly escape strings then. I even gave you the proper code for your test to work. Its not a PHP bug nor a libxml2 bug so it's bogus. Regardless of the language you use you will hit escaping issues. If you really think its a bug somewhere you need to take it to the W3C. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2010-06-18 16:33:42] pecoes at gmail dot com Alright. It's not a PHP bug. So... what now? How do I deal with it in PHP? Just because PHP is innocent, doesn't mean there's no need for a fix. It's still a bug! Classifying it as "bogus" won't do a thing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2010-06-18 16:22:05] rrichards@php.net Thank you for taking the time to write to us, but this is not a bug. Please double-check the documentation available at http://www.php.net/manual/ and the instructions on how to report a bug at http://bugs.php.net/how-to-report.php You need to take into account PHP string escaping too. $q = "/test[text()='\"']"; For more complex situations with mixed quote types, its a general overall issue with XPath not a PHP bug. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The remainder of the comments for this report are too long. To view the rest of the comments, please view the bug report online at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=51785 -- Edit this bug report at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=51785&edit=1