JDOM, XPath and Namespace Interactions

Programmer Question

Hi all,

I'm having a very frustrating time extracting some elements from a JDOM document using an XPath expression. Here's a sample XML document - I'd like to remove the ItemCost elements from the document altogether, but I'm having trouble getting an XPath expression to evaluate to anything at the moment.

  
     
        Demo Operator Pricebook
        
           
              Demo Wifi
              DemoWifi
              15
              10
           
           
              1Mb DIA
              Demo1MbDIA
              20
              15
           
        
     
  

I would normally just use an expression such as //srv:ItemCost to identify these elements, which works fine on other documents, however here it continually returns 0 nodes in the List. Here's the code I've been using:

Namespace ns = Namespace.getNamespace("srv","http://ess.com/ws/srv");   
XPath filterXpression = XPath.newInstance("//ItemCost");
filterXpression.addNamespace(ns);   
List nodes = filterXpression.selectNodes(response);

Where response is a JDOM element containing the above XML snippet (verified with an XMLOutputter). nodes continually has size()==0 whenever parsing this document. Using the XPath parser in Eclipse on the same document, this expression does not work either. After some digging, I got the Eclipse evaluator to work with the following expression: //*[local-name() = 'ItemCost'], however replacing the //srv:ItemCost in the Java code with this still produced no results. Another thing I noticed is if I remove the namespace declaration from the XML, //srv:ItemCost will resolve correctly in the Eclipse parser, but I can't remove it from the XML. I've been scratching my head for ours hours on this one now, and would really appreciate some nudging in the right direction.

Many thanks

Edit : Fixed code -

Document build = new Document(response);
XPath filterXpression = XPath.newInstance("//srv:ItemCost");
List nodes = filterXpression.selectNodes(build);

Find the answer here