xpath - Find attribute names that start with a certain pattern

Question

I am looking to find all attributes of an element that match a certain pattern.

So for an element

<element s2="1" name="aaaa" id="1" />
<element s3="1" name="aaaa" id="2" />

I would like to be able to find all attributes that start with 's' (returning the value of s1 for the first element and s3 for the value of the second element).

If this is outside of xpath's ability please let me know.

Answer 1

Use:

element/@*[starts-with(name(), 's')]

This XPath expression selects all atribute nodes whose name starts with the string 's' and that are attributes of elements named element that are children of the current node.

starts-with() is a standard function in XPath 1.0