Wanted: only attributes .extract() - function returns the complete node

Question

Hi I have xml documents stored as XMLType, I would like to extract only the attributes of a node which I point to using a xPath expression. As a matter of fact the funcion .extract( some XPath) returns the corresponding node inclusive all children. This is very costly since I have large XML documents having a deep structure.
Thanks

Answer 1

Your XPATH is incorrect
The XPATH you provided identifies the node with the attribute name = blah
The XPATH you want would end with /@*
See
http://www.w3c.org/TR/xpath#section-Location-Steps
eg
SQL> select extract(xml,'/Root/Element[@A1="FOO"]/@*')
2 from
3 (select xmltype(
4 '
5 <Root>
6 <Element A1="FOO" A2="BAA"/>
7 <Element A1="BAA" A2="FOO"/>
8 </Root>
9 ') xml
10 from dual
11 );
EXTRACT(XML,'/ROOT/ELEMENT[@A1="FOO"]/@*')
FOOBAA
Unfortunately, extract will return a concatenation of the value of the selected attributes