XML Data. Extracting elements and attributes using Xpath or another?

Question

Hi experts,
Using Oracle 11g.
I have an XML table which stores XML in one column (xml_col) like the below structure.
Example:
<measure id="abc">
  <data-elements>
    <data-element id="ab">
      <value>40</value>
    </data-element>
    <data-element id="cd">
      <value>8</value>
    </data-element>
    <data-element id="ef">
      <value>38</value>
    </data-element>
    <data-element id="gh">
      <value>32</value>
    </data-element>
  </data-elements>
</measure>I've been trying endlessly to run XPath queries on this column to obtain the attribute of the <data-element> node and the value of the <value> node within.
My goal is to turn this into a table of:
ab | 40
cd | 8
ef | 38
gh | 32
My mind is stuck on doing this below and wrapping it with a CSV to rows hierarchical query. I can not convert to xmltype to a string to make that work though.
select str1,str2 from (
select extract(xml_col, 'string-join(//@id, '','')') str1
,extract(xml_col, 'string-join(//value, '','')') str2
from xml_temp_table)
CONNECT BY LEVEL <= LENGTH (REGEXP_REPLACE (str1, '[^,]+')) + 1;But I get the following error:
ORA-31011: XML parsing failed
ORA-19202: Error occurred in XML processing
LPX-00607: Invalid reference: 'string-join'.
I'm looking for a non PL solution.
Any suggestions appreciated.
Thanks
Edited by: chris001 on Feb 26, 2013 12:06 PM
Edited by: chris001 on Feb 26, 2013 12:07 PM

Answer 1

chris001 wrote:
My mind is stuck on doing this below and wrapping it with a CSV to rows hierarchical query. I can not convert to xmltype to a string to make that work though. Oh boy!
This should ease your pain ;)
SQL> select x.*
  2  from xml_temp_table t
  3     , xmltable(
  4         '/measure/data-elements/data-element'
  5         passing t.xml_col
  6         columns element_id  varchar2(10) path '@id'
  7               , element_val number       path 'value'
  8       ) x ;
ELEMENT_ID ELEMENT_VAL
ab                  40
cd                   8
ef                  38
gh                  32