XPath function
starts-with()
Whether a string begins with another. XPath 1.0 has no ends-with() — that is 2.0.
starts-with(a, b) is true when a begins with b. Same argument order as contains(): the string being tested comes first.
There is no ends-with() in XPath 1.0. The idiom is a substring comparison against the tail: substring(a, string-length(a) - string-length(b) + 1) = b.
- Syntax
starts-with(haystack, prefix) → boolean- Returns
- boolean
- Kind
- Function
- Version
- XPath 1.0 (libxml2)
Worked examples
Each result below is what the evaluator returned, asserted on every test run. An empty result means an empty node-set — which is an answer, not an error.
The sample documents
Every example on this page runs against this document. The sitemap one is namespaced on purpose — almost every real XML document is, and that changes which expressions match.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<order id="A-1001" tier="gold">
<customer country="NO">Ada Lovelace</customer>
<lines>
<line sku="WIDGET-1" qty="2"><price>14.50</price></line>
<line sku="WIDGET-2" qty="1"><price>39.00</price></line>
<line sku="GIFT-WRAP" qty="1"><price>0.00</price></line>
</lines>
<note> Deliver after 09:00 </note>
</order>Related
- contains()Whether one string occurs inside another. The most-used XPath function, and the one most often given its arguments the wrong way round.
- substring()A slice of a string, indexed from 1 — not from 0, which is the mistake that shifts every result by one character.
- string-length()The number of characters in a string. With no argument, of the context node.
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