How would you find all nodes between two H3’s using XPATH?

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In XPath 1.0 one way to do this is by using the Kayessian method for node-set intersection:

$ns1[count(.|$ns2) = count($ns2)]

The above expression selects exactly the nodes that are part both of the node-set $ns1 and the node-set $ns2.

To apply this to the specific question — let’s say we need to select all nodes between the 2nd and 3rd h3 element in the following XML document:

<html>
  <h3>Title T31</h3>
    <a31/>
    <b31/>
  <h3>Title T32</h3>
    <a32/>
    <b32/>
  <h3>Title T33</h3>
    <a33/>
    <b33/>
  <h3>Title T34</h3>
    <a34/>
    <b34/>
  <h3>Title T35</h3>
</html>

We have to substitute $ns1 with:

/*/h3[2]/following-sibling::node()

and to substitute $ns2 with:

/*/h3[3]/preceding-sibling::node()

Thus, the complete XPath expression is:

/*/h3[2]/following-sibling::node()
             [count(.|/*/h3[3]/preceding-sibling::node())
             =
              count(/*/h3[3]/preceding-sibling::node())
             ]

We can verify that this is the correct XPath expression:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>

 <xsl:template match="https://stackoverflow.com/">
  <xsl:copy-of select=
   "/*/h3[2]/following-sibling::node()
             [count(.|/*/h3[3]/preceding-sibling::node())
             =
              count(/*/h3[3]/preceding-sibling::node())
             ]
   "/>
 </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

When this transformation is applied on the XML document presented above, the wanted, correct result is produced:

<a32/>

<b32/>

II. XPath 2.0 solution:

Use the intersect operator:

   /*/h3[2]/following-sibling::node()
intersect
   /*/h3[3]/preceding-sibling::node()

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